Economic and political conditions (to 1848).—As we approach the Revolution of 1848 we discover the signs of increasing social ferment. It was not merely that suffering, poverty and crime were increasing, but that the public was more sensitive to pain. The consciousness of a right to enjoy the fruits of culture and civilization was awakened in ever wider circles. The reforms of Stein and Scharnhorst were telling upon the people. Common schools were bringing peasant and artisan within the range of scholars' thoughts. Men admitted to the duty of defending their country in the army aspired to equality of opportunity under its civil shield. Proletarians and agricultural laborers began to show symptoms of that social ambition which afterwards produced social democracy.
In this period the "Great Industry" was developed. The policy fostered by Frederick the Great, broken by the Napoleonic oppression, was taken up by Prussian rulers. A system of canals was extended; postal service was rapidly improving; steamships plied between Europe and America; stories of the New World came back to kindle and inflame ambitions and hopes. In some regions, especially along the Rhine, the factory system was producing a special class of wage-laborers.[1]
This rising ambition was met, on the part of rulers, with official repression. The courts of Austria and Germany sought to quell dissent and discussion in church, state and industrial circles. But the monarchy by no means lost sight of its duty to the people. Claiming absolute rights "by the grace of God" the kings of Prussia never quite forgot their rôle as an earthly providence.
Economically Germany remained during this period a backward state, as compared with England. Machine production was not advanced. The hand-workers, organized in guilds, were still more important than the wage-workers of the factories. Trades unions of the English type were yet unknown. The proletariat was hardly possessed of a class consciousness. Indeed, in 1842, Lorenz von Stein could say that Germany had nothing to fear
- ↑ G. Schmoller, Zur Sozial- und Gewerbepolitik, ss. 18 ff.
