ich Wilhelm had found so attractive in socialistic
writings, was absent, and it seemed to him as if the new doctrine in
its removal from the enthusiast's study to the beer-tables of the crowd
had lost all nobility, and had sunk to degradation.

Paul took no trouble to conceal the disgust which "this dirty rabble"
gave him. He gazed contemptuously about him, and every time that one of
his neighbors' elbows came near his coat he brushed the place angrily,
and muttered half-aloud:

"Well, if I were the government I would jolly soon stop your meetings."

Dr. Schrotter, on the other hand, found the sight of the crowd rekindle
in him all the feeling of sentiment he had had for the old democrats;
he felt his heart overflow with pity and tenderness. With his
physician's eyes he pierced through the brutal physiognomies, and
observed them with kindness and sympathy, making his friends attentive
too.

"One of the martyrs of work," he said gently, indicating a haggard man
sitting at the next table who had lost one eye.

"How do you know that?"

"He must be a worker in metal, and has had a splinter in one of his
eyes. He had the injured eye removed to save the other."

Here was a baker with pale face and inflamed eyelids, coughing
badly--consumptive, in consequence of the dust from the flour--his eyes
affected by the heat of the oven. Here was a man who had lost a finger
of his left hand--the victim of a cloth loom; and here a pallid-looking
man, showing when he spoke or laughed slate-colored gums--a case of
lead-poisoning, with a painful death as the inevitable result. And it
seemed as if over all these cripples and sickly people the Genius of
Work hovered as the black angel of Eastern stories, tracing on their
foreheads with his brush--on this one mutilation, on this one an early
death. Schrotter's observations and explanations placed the whole
meeting in a different light to Wilhelm. The coarseness of the men,
even the dirt on their hands and faces, touched him like a reproach,
and in their jokes and laughter he seemed to hear a bitter cry.

A reproach, a complaint against whom? Against the capitalists, or
against inexorable fate? Wilhelm asked himself whether the conditions
of labor were attributable to men, or were not the result of cruel
necessity? Could the capitalist be responsible for the accidents of
machines, the dust from flour, the splitting of iron? If these workmen
had not been one-eyed or consumptive could t