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Updated: May 4, 2025
The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class shall be responsible to the central authority emperor, duke, president; the name does not matter for the national expense and the national defence, and it shall be responsible to the working-classes of all kinds for homes and lands and implements, and the opportunity to labor at all times.
The steamship and railway, and mutual interests in trade and commerce, have united nation to nation, and the press has given one mind and simultaneous thoughts to the whole community. Power there is in plenty for the emancipation of the whole race; since the steam engine and machinery may be to the working-classes what they have hitherto been to those classes above them.
The introduction of machinery for doing every element of the work which was formerly done by hand has resulted in making shoes at a fraction of their former labor cost, and in selling them so cheap that now almost every man, woman, and child in the working-classes buys one or two pairs of shoes per year, and wears shoes all the time, whereas formerly each workman bought perhaps one pair of shoes every five years, and went barefoot most of the time, wearing shoes only as a luxury or as a matter of the sternest necessity.
And if still more of these dealers in spiritual nourishment are developed further, as men of science desire, and a studio is erected in every village; if an orchestra is set up, and authors are supported in those conditions which artistic people regard as indispensable for themselves, I imagine that the working-classes will sooner take an oath never to look at any pictures, never to listen to a symphony, never to read poetry or novels, than to feed all these persons.
After all our study of statistics, of figures, of contrasts, I am not sure that we arrive at any very valuable conclusions. American working-classes work ever shorter hours, gain higher wages, but they are indubitably less happy, less rich in experience, less serene than the Germans.
But the growth of thrift in the working-classes, the increase of the machinery of charity, the rise of the average of wages these causes have been wholly inoperative to check the growth of indoor pauperism.
The appeal acts like a charm to call out the passion and to silence the reason of vast masses of the population in all ranks and conditions. Even among the working-classes and the poor who, one might imagine, have all to lose and nothing to gain by war it is by no means certain that the war fever will not flame for the hour.
A man must be an impudent creature of privilege who would dare to claim as much. An artist like Christophe, in his inmost conscience, could not but be on the side of the working-classes. What man more than the spiritual worker has to suffer from the immorality of social conditions, from the scandalously unequal partition of wealth among men?
But he talked to the two men in front of him almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of our conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with Triscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but did not know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their employers.
A similar instance of malicious inaccuracy is widely spoken of regarding our lesser ones. "Is it really a fact, Mr. Kong," exclaimed a maiden of magnanimous condescension, to this person recently, "that we poor women are despised in your country, and that among the working-classes female children are even systematically abandoned as soon as they are born?"
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