solute government
at the defender of the people's rights. Everywhere hatred and malice,
everywhere a mad desire to gag, to maltreat, to tear limb from limb;
this unfettering of the basest human passions giving meanwhile such an
impetus to bribery, corruption, and unprincipled advancement for party
purposes as to resemble the loathsome luxuriant growth of mildew in the
damp corners of some neglected storeroom.

The high tide of the foreign millions had ebbed away, showing itself to
have been no fructifying Nile but a destructive lava stream, leaving
the country charred and desolate after its passage. The gold that only
yesterday had poured through greedy fingers, had turned to-day to ashes
and withered leaves like the goblin gold of a fairy tales. Diminished
inclination for work, an insanely increased demand for the luxuries of
life, the accepted ideas of morality shaken to their foundations by
scandalous examples of triumphant vice and villainy--these were the
blessings that remained after the so-called impetus following on the
"Downfall." Work was scarcer, wages lower, but the flood of country
people seeking work continued to roll toward the capital, overcoming
with irresistible force the backward wave of unfortunates who could
find no employment in the building yards, the factories or the
workshops, trampling blindly over the bodies of the fallen, like a herd
of buffaloes which marches ever straight ahead, which nothing can turn
out of its course, and when it arrives at a precipice over which the
leaders fall, presses onward till the last one is swallowed up in the
depths. The misery and privation became heartrending to witness. Each
morning you might see in the working quarters of the town and suburbs
hundreds of strong men, their hands--perforce idle--buried in their
torn and empty pockets, going from factory to factory asking for work,
while the overseers would wave them off from afar to avoid a useless
interchange of words. If, in the years of the French milliards, the
workingman had turned socialist out of sheer envy and wantonness, he
became so now under the sting of adversity, and in all the length and
breadth of Berlin there was hardly one of the proletariat who was not a
fanatical disciple of the new doctrine, with its slashing denunciations
against all that was, and its intoxicating promises of all that was to
be. Wilhelm had many opportunities of intercourse with the unemployed.
He gave help as far as his f