ation of how capitalist society breaks the
way in revolutionizing human affairs, in this instance in domestic
life,--but only for its elect. Domestic life being thus radically
transformed, the servant, this "slave of all the whims of the mistress,"
is no more,--and the mistress neither. "No servants, no culture!" cries
the horrified Herr v. Treitschke with comic pathos. He can as little
imagine society without servants as Aristotle could without slaves. The
matter of surprise is that Herr v. Treitschke looks upon our servants as
the "carriers of civilization." Treitschke, like Eugen Richter, is
furthermore greatly worried by the shoe-polishing and clothes-dusting
question, which neither is able to attend to personally. It so happens,
however, that with nine-tenths of the people everyone sees to that
himself, or the wife does for her husband, or a daughter or son for the
family. We might answer that what the nine-tenths have hitherto done,
the remnant tenth may also do. But there is another way out. Why should
not in future society the youth of the land, without distinction of sex,
be enlisted for such necessary work? Work does not dishonor, even if it
consist in polishing boots. Many a member of the old nobility, and
officers of the army at that, learned the lesson when, to escape their
debts, they ran off to the United States, and there became servants, or
shoe-polishers. Eugen Richter, in his pamphlets, goes even so far as to
cause the downfall of the "Socialist Imperial Chancellor" on the
"Shoe-polishing Question," and the consequent falling to pieces of the
"Socialist State." The "Socialist Imperial Chancellor" refuses to polish
his own shoes; hence his troubles. The bourgeoisie has hugely enjoyed
this description of Richter, and it has thereby furnished evidence of
the modesty of its demands upon a criticism of Socialism. But Eugen
Richter lived to experience the sorrow of not only seeing one of his own
party members in Nuerenberg invent a shoe-polishing machine soon after
the appearance of that pamphlet, but of also learning that at the
Chicago Exposition of 1893 an electric shoe-polishing machine was
exhibited that did the work perfectly. Thus the principal objection,
raised by Richter and Treitschke against Socialist society, has been
practically thrown overboard by an invention made under the bourgeois
social system itself.

The revolutionary transformation, that radically changes all the
relations of man, espe