system of mutual
protection in small and disconnected circles, there was to be unchained
the free individual struggle of individual efforts in the competition
for property.

On the religious field, Luther was the representative of these bourgeois
aspirations. When he took a stand for the freedom of marriage, the
question could not be simply about civic marriage, which was realized in
Germany only in our own age through the civil laws and the legislation
therewith connected,--freedom to move, freedom of pursuit, and freedom
of domicile. In how far the position of woman was thereby improved will
be shown later. Meanwhile things had not matured so far at the time of
the Reformation. If, through the regulations of the Reformation many
were afforded the possibility to marry, the severe persecutions that
followed later hampered the freedom of sexual intercourse. The Roman
Catholic clergy having in its time displayed a certain degree of
tolerance, and even laxity, towards sexual excesses, now the Protestant
clergy, once itself was provided for, raged all the more violently
against the practice. War was declared upon the public "houses of
women;" they were closed as "Holes of Satan;" the prostitutes were
persecuted as "daughters of the devil;" and every woman who slipped was
placed on the pillory as a specimen of all sinfulness.

Out of the once hearty small property-holding bourgeois of the Middle
Ages, who lived and let live, now became a bigoted, straight-laced,
dark-browed maw-worm, who "saved-up," to the end that his large
property-holding bourgeois successor might live all the more lustily in
the nineteenth century, and might be able to dissipate all the more. The
respectable citizen, with his stiff necktie, his narrow horizon and his
severe code of morals, was the prototype of society. The legitimate
wife, who had not been particularly edified by the sensuality of the
Middle Ages, tolerated in Roman Catholic days, was quite at one with the
Puritanical spirit of Protestantism. But other circumstances supervened,
that, affecting, as they did, unfavorably the general condition of
things in Germany, joined in exercising in general an unfavorable
influence upon the position of woman.

The revolution--effected in production, money and trade, particularly as
regarded Germany,--due to the discovery of America and the sea-route to
the East Indies, produced, first of all, a great reaction on the social
domain. Germany ceased to