he building of a special central power place."

What was then only projected, has since been in great part executed.
Philistine narrowness in Germany lives to shrug its shoulders at these
and such like schemes, although in Germany also we find ourselves just
now in the midst of one of those technical revolutions, that render the
private kitchen, together with a number of other occupations, hitherto
appertaining to the household, as superfluous as handicraft has been
rendered by machinery and modern technique. In the early days of the
nineteenth century, Napoleon pronounced insane the idea of constructing
a ship that could be set in motion by steam. The idea of building a
railroad was declared silly by many folks who passed for sensible:
nobody, it was argued, could remain alive on such a conveyance: the
rapidity of motion would deprive the passengers of breath. Identical
treatment is to-day accorded to a number of new ideas. He who sixty
years ago would have made to our women the proposition of replacing the
carrying of water with water-pipes, would have been exposed to the
charge of trying to lead women and servants into idleness.

Nevertheless the great revolution in technique is in full march on all
fields; nothing can any longer hold it back; and bourgeois society,
having conjured the same into life, has the historic mission of also
carrying the revolution to perfection, and to promote on all fields the
budding of the germs for radical transformations, _which a social order,
built on new foundations, would only have to generalize on a large
scale, and make common property_.

The trend, accordingly, of our social life is not to banish woman back
to the house and the hearth, as our "domestic life" fanatics prescribe,
and after which they lust, like the Jews in the Desert after the
fleshpots of Egypt. _On the contrary, the whole trend of society is to
lead woman out of the narrow sphere of strictly domestic life to a full
participation in the public life of the people_--a designation that will
not then cover the male sex only--and in the task of _human
civilization_. Laveleye fully recognized this when he wrote:[130] "In
the measure that what we are in the habit of designating as civilization
advances, the sentiments of piety and the family bonds weaken, and they
exercise a decreasing influence upon the actions of men. This fact is so
general that a law of social development may be recognized therein." Not
only has t