current of air, which
the old order could not for long resist. The French invasion hastened
the downfall,--this side of the Rhine also--of the old, worn-out
system. Whatever attempt was made, during the period of re-action after
1815, to turn back the wheels of time, the New had grown too strong, it
finally remained victorious.

The rise of machinery, the application of the natural sciences to the
process of production, the new roads of commerce and traffic burst
asunder the last vestiges of the old system. The guild privileges, the
personal restrictions, the mark and jurisdictional rights, together with
all that thereby hung, walked into the lumber room. The strongly
increased need of labor-power did not rest content with the men, it
demanded woman also as a cheaper article. The conditions that had become
untenable, had to fall; and they fell. The time thereto,--long
wished-for by the newly risen class, the bourgeoisie or capitalist
class--arrived the moment Germany gained her political unity. The
capitalist class demanded imperiously the unhampered development of all
the social forces; it demanded this for the benefit of its own
capitalist interests, that, at that time, and, to a certain degree, were
also the interests of the large majority. Thus came about the liberty of
trade, the liberty of emigration, the removal of the barriers to
marriage,--in short, that whole system of legislation that designates
itself "liberal." The old-time reactionists expected from these measures
the smash-up of morality. The late Adolph Ketteler of Mainz moaned,
already in 1865, accordingly, before the new social legislation had
become general, "that the tearing down of the existing barriers to
matrimony meant the dissolution of wedlock, it being now possible for
the married to run away from each other at will." A pretty admission
that the moral bonds of modern marriage are so weak, that only
_compulsion_ can be relied on to hold the couple together.

The circumstance, on the one hand, that the now naturally more numerous
marriages effected a rapid increase of population, and, on the other,
that the gigantically developing industry of the new era brought on many
ills, never known of before, caused the spectre of "overpopulation" to
rise anew. Conservative and liberal economists pull since then the same
string. We shall show what this fear of so-called overpopulation means;
we shall trace the feared phenomenon back to its legitimate sour