poverty, secretly wiped the last drops of tears from
their suffering faces. Hunger reigned supreme within these walls. The
woman, in the last stage of pregnancy, suffered the keenest under the
lamentations of the younger children, to whom she could give no food.
The husband had been gone two days on a begging tramp. He would surely
bring home something, though it was very difficult to get anything in
this neighborhood. One must tramp a long distance for a piece of bread.
Yesterday they could still obtain a few potatoes, but to-day she had
nothing more to give, nor did she know what to tell the children. She
had implored the minister to let her have something to eat, if only a
few morsels, but he had nothing himself, he said. The tightly pressed
lips of the older girls trembled violently, every breath of the family
was despair. Our presence had silenced the cries of the children with
the frost-bitten faces, but when we left, they again would tear the
heart of their mother, their weak little voices calling for bread.

No one could expect such fatalism from these starving little ones, that
they should coolly and philosophically analyse the "economic necessity"
that condemned their parents to a desperate battle with hunger. The only
thing that could perform miracles here was a coin. The poor woman did
not dare to believe that she actually held one in her hand. That which
was to secure these unfortunates relief from death, at the same moment
fostered elsewhere conceit, corruption and extravagance, and is being
used for the conversion of heathen to brotherly love. The terrible sight
of this mother and her little ones conjured up the heartlessness and
emptiness of all philanthropy and charity for dumb misery. Greatest of
all social crimes, that makes the possibility of stilling the hunger of
the little children dependent on money.

One morning Hauptmann and I went on foot to Reichenbach, where I
introduced him to an old weaver, a Socialist, who had participated in
the co-operative scheme proposed by Bismarck. The old man had much of
interest to relate of this venture, that had been very meagerly assisted
by the government. He said that the association could have survived, had
it not been for the conspiracy of the manufacturers, who had a large
capital at their disposal. The result of this, for the co-operative
movement, was the closing of the market. At one time all the weaving
products sent to the Leipzig Fair had to be trans