ost bending
and pliable of all creatures. A few years of changed life and occupation
often suffice to make quite a different being out of the same man.
Nowhere does rapid external change show itself more strikingly than when
a person is transferred from poor and reduced, to materially improved
circumstances. It is in his mental make-up that such a person will be
least able to deny his antecedents, but that is due to the circumstance
that, with most of such people, after they have reached a certain age,
the desire for intellectual improvement is rarely felt; neither do they
need it. Such an upstart rarely suffers under this defect. In our days,
that look to money and material means, people are far readier to bow
_before the man with a large purse, than before a man of knowledge and
great intellectual gifts, especially if he has the misfortune of being
poor and rankless_. Instances of this sort are furnished every day. The
worship of the golden calf stood in no age higher than in this,--whence
it comes that we are living "in the best possible world."

The strongest evidence of the effect exercised upon man by radically
different conditions of life is furnished in our several industrial
centers. In these centers employer and employe present externally such a
contrast as if they belonged to different races. Although accustomed to
the contrast, it struck us almost with the shock of a surprise on the
occasion of a campaign mass meeting, that we addressed in the winter of
1877 in an industrial town of the Erzgebirge region. The meeting, at
which a debate was to be held between a liberal professor and ourselves,
was so arranged that both sides were equally represented. The front part
of the hall was taken by our opponents,--almost without exception,
healthy, strong, often large figures; in the rear of the hall and in the
galleries stood workingmen and small tradesmen, nine-tenths of the
former weavers,--mostly short, thin, shallow-chested, pale-faced
figures, with whom worry and want looked out at every pore. One set
represented the full-stomached virtue and solvent morality of bourgeois
society; the other set, the working bees and beasts of burden, on the
product of whose labor the gentlemen made so fine an appearance. _Let
both be placed for one generation under equally favorable conditions,
and the contrast will vanish with most; it certainly is blotted out in
their descendants._

It is also evident that, in general, it is