is work more agreeable with gambling and
drinking, and going for loafing excursions about the neighborhood.
Visits to wine and beer-houses and dancing-rooms were endlessly
multiplied, and everything had the golden foundation which the proverb
of an age of simplicity hardly attributed to honorable handicraft.
Profits were squandered in drink; life was a rush and a riot without
end.

But curiously, in the same degree in which the opportunities of work
were increased and wages became higher, life everywhere easier, and the
ordinary enjoyments greater; just so did the workman grow discontented.
Desires increased with their gratification, and envy measured its own
prosperity by the side of the luxury of the nouveaux riches.

The hand which never before had held so much money, now learned to
clinch itself in hatred against the owner of property, the company
promoter; against all in fact who were not of the proletariat. The
Social Democrat had sprung up ten years before from the circle of the
intelligent political economists and philosophers of the artisan
classes. Since the war they numbered thousands and ten of thousands,
and now began to grow and widen like a moorland fire, at first hardly
perceptible, then betraying through the puff of smoke the fire creeping
along the ground; then a thousand tongues of flame leap upward, and
suddenly sooner or later the whole heath is in a blaze. Innumerable
apostles preaching their turbid doctrines in all the factories and
workshops, found hearers who were discontented and easily carried away.
The social democracy of the workmen was neither a political nor
economical programme which appealed to the intellect, or could be
proved or argued about, but rather an instinct in which religious
mysticism, good and bad impulses, needs, emotional desires were
wonderfully mingled. The men were filled with enmity against those who
had a large share of money; the new faith dogmatically explained
possession of property as a crime--that it was meritorious to hate the
possessor and necessary to destroy him. They were made discontented
with their limited destiny by the sight of the world and its treasures;
the new faith promised them a future paradise in the shape of an equal
division of goods--a paradise in which the hand was permitted to take
whatever the eye desired. They were disgusted by the consciousness of
their deformity and roughness, which dragged them down to the lowest
rank in the midst of s