endant; it becomes seized with violent
democratic fits as soon as the middle class has secured its own
supremacy, but falls back into the abject despondency of fear as soon
as the class below itself, the proletarians, attempts an independent
movement. We shall by and by see this class, in Germany, pass
alternately from one of these stages to the other.

The working class in Germany is, in its social and political
development, as far behind that of England and France as the German
bourgeoisie is behind the bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master,
like man. The evolution of the conditions of existence for a numerous,
strong, concentrated, and intelligent proletarian class goes hand in
hand with the development of the conditions of existence for a
numerous, wealthy, concentrated, and powerful middle class. The
working class movement itself never is independent, never is of an
exclusively proletarian character until all the different factions of
the middle class, and particularly its most progressive faction, the
large manufacturers, have conquered political power, and remodelled
the State according to their wants. It is then that the inevitable
conflict between the employer and the employed becomes imminent, and
cannot be adjourned any longer; that the working class can no longer
be put off with delusive hopes and promises never to be realized; that
the great problem of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the
proletariat, is at last brought forward fairly and in its proper
light. Now, in Germany the mass of the working class were employed,
not by those modern manufacturing lords of which Great Britain
furnishes such splendid specimens, but by small tradesmen, whose
entire manufacturing system is a mere relic of the Middle Ages. And as
there is an enormous difference between the great cotton lord and the
petty cobbler or master tailor, so there is a corresponding distance
from the wide-awake factory operative of modern manufacturing Babylons
to the bashful journeyman tailor or cabinetmaker of a small country
town, who lives in circumstances and works after a plan very little
different from those of the like sort of men some five hundred years
ago. This general absence of modern conditions of life, of modern
modes of industrial production, of course was accompanied by a
pretty equally general absence of modern ideas, and it is, therefore,
not to be wondered at if, at the outbreak of the Revolution, a large
part of