weave, bleach and sew the
linen and clothes, prepare soap and candles, brew beer,--in short, she
was the veriest Cinderella: her only recreation was Sunday's church.
Marriage was contracted only within the same social circles; the
strongest and most ludicrous spirit of caste dominated all relations,
and tolerated no transgression. The daughters were brought up in the
same spirit; they were held under strict home seclusion; their mental
education did not go beyond the bounds of the narrowest home relations.
On top of this, an empty and hollow formality, meant as a substitute for
education and culture, turned existence, that of woman in particular,
into a veritable treadmill. Thus the spirit of the Reformation
degenerated into the worst pedantry, that sought to smother the natural
desires of man, together with his pleasures in life under a confused
mass of rules and usages that affected to be "worthy," but that benumbed
the soul.

Gradually, however, an economic change took place, that first seized
Western Europe and then reached into Germany also. The discovery of
America, the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, the opening of the sea
route of the East Indies, the further discoveries that hinged on these,
and finally, the circumnavigation of the earth, revolutionized the life
and views of the most advanced nations of Europe. The unthought-of rapid
expansion of the world's commerce, called to life through the opening of
ever newer markets for European industry and products, revolutionized
the old system of handicraft. Manufacture arose, and thence flowed large
production. Germany--so long held back in her material development by
her religious wars and her political disintegration, which religious
differences promoted,--was finally dragged into the stream of the
general progress. In several quarters, large production developed under
the form of manufacture: flax and wool-spinning and weaving, the
manufacture of cloth, mining, the manufacture of iron, glass and
porcelain, transportation, etc. Fresh labor power, female included, came
into demand. But this newly rising form of industry met with the most
violent opposition on the part of the craftsmen, ossified in the guild
and medieval corporation system, who furiously fought every change in
the method of production, and saw therein a mortal enemy. The French
Revolution supervened. While casting aside the older order in France,
the Revolution also carried into Germany a fresh