and desperate proletariat has been chiefly responsible for the gradual enactment by the rulers themselves of legislative measures looking forward to the removal of at least some of the most flagrant evils resulting from the slums and tenements.

WORKING CLASS TRADE UNIONS.

Middle class writers, responding to a natural tendency to extoll the virtues of the group to which they belong, also ascribe an enormous role to the humanitarian sentiment of their class in effecting a rise of wages and a reduction of the hours of labor. Doubtless they exaggerate; at any rate that is what most workingmen declare who proudly boast that they owe every improvement, not purely municipal and social, to their own initiative and to that alone. In the opinion of these men it was because, taken by surprise by the Industrial Revolution, the laborers played an entirely passive role that the enslavement, which wage-earning in its first stage meant, was imposed on them. And the liberation, they unanimously declare, dates from the day when casting about for means to curtail the oppression, they made up their minds to organize. Without belittling the humanitarian sentiment and the social improvement which it undoubtedly helped effect, it must be clear in the mind of every objective student that the first substantial check sustained by the capitalist in his economic mastery of the situation came on the day when he dealt not with individual workingmen, but with a marshalled army under leaders. And if proof be needed it is supplied by the resistance of the middle classes to the associations or trade-unions of the workers. They

indignantly denounced this natural and honorable movement of self-help as something wicked and even revolutionary and brought the machinery of the law into action in order to stigmatize it as illegal and to break it up by force. It took a generation of stubborn fighting before the resistance of the British Parliament was even partially overcome and the trade-unions legalized by a general statute. From that moment, however, that is, from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, capital and labor began to wage their historic battle on somewhat more equal terms and the next one hundred years were destined to see a very important improvement in the position of the wage-earners without, however, shaking the effective domination of the capitalists.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

Such was the Industrial Revolution and such were some of its problems when it first established itself in the land of its birth, in England. The great victory it won for English goods in the markets of the world would have precipitated an immediate imitation on the continent, if, as already pointed out, Europe had not just then been economicaly paralyzed by the wars of the French Revolution. Not till the overthrow of Napoleon in 1815 was a condition established that enabled the harrassed countries to look about and undertake measures calculated to equalize the contest with England for the possession of the industrial profits. And even then it was only France that had advanced sufficiently to install the English machines and embark on the capitalist system. Accordingly, in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century

France went through the same transformation as had just been effected in England and was confronted in its turn with all the developments and problems which we have just sketched. Needless, therefore, to review the economic situation under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII (1815-24), Charles X (1824-30), and Louis Philip (1830-48). The one thing to note is a very original intellectual contribution made by France to the solution of the war of capital and labor. In the face of the hardships and sufferings of the working classes France, in close imitation of England, experienced a growth of the philanthropic sense among the middle classes, together with the self-assertion of the workers expressed in the creation of trade-unions. But something radical and thorough-going in the French genius obliged the native thinkers to pry beneath superficial phenomena, and to aim at not remedial measures merely but at a genuine and complete cure of the evils attending the reign of the machine. Reflection along these lines gradually led some advanced philosophers to declare the private ownership of capital to be the root of the trouble and to advocate a nationalization of the means of production in order to insure an equal distribution of material benefits among the whole citizen body. Naturally a good deal of this thinking was very crude but as inaugurating the radical and genuinely revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century uncompromisingly opposed to the continued domination of the middle classes it can not be ignored. St. Simon is perhaps the most important pioneer in this field. He was, however, a closet-philosopher and never reached any but a narrow drawing-room

audience. It was Louis Blanc (chiefly active before 1848) who first carried the new radicalism into public life. He held that the only way to effect the overthrow of capital was by the direct action and revolt of the workingmen and for this reason he carried his agitation down into their circles. Blessed with grandiloquent speech and a not inconsiderable organizing talent he brought about the first union of workingmen with the avowed object of a social revolution to be conducted in the name of equality and justice and to be crowned with the confiscation of private capital for the benefit of the community at large. Of course the doctrine was so new and startling that not many of the workingmen were converted to it and the rest, in so far as they leaned to the democratic faith at all, preferred to remain loyal to the notion of a purely political republic inherited from the French Revolution. Nonetheless Louis Blanc started a movement in French life that has continued with ups and downs to our own day and that as early as the year 1848 was already strong enough to play a considerable role in the uprising which buried the monarchy of the Bourbons and inaugurated the socalled Second Republic (1848-51).

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN GERMANY.

With the industrial current in the ascendancy in England and France it was certain that the other European countries would yield to it as soon as the conditions within their borders permitted. To take the case of Germany-the German people were morally and educationally sufficiently advanced to fall in behind their western neighbors, but unfortunately their political disorganization was such that a strong and general industrial move

ment was out of the question. Prussia, the soundest of the states composing the German body, busied itself with clearing the ground and between 1815 and 1840 succeeded in forming a German customs-union or Zollverein, which converted Germany into a single area for economic purposes. By this wise measure the evils of political disunion were partially overcome and the ground cleared for the entrance of Germany into the industrial race. However, the German movement did not pass out of its swaddling-clothes till well after the middle of the century.

THE POLITICAL VICTORY OF THE MIDDLE CLASS IN ENGLAND, FRANCE AND GERMANY.

While this vast economic transformation of Europe was under way, not particularly noticed by the world and decidedly not estimated at its proper value, certain movements occurred in the noisy realm of politics which were probably overestimated at the time but which nonetheless hold a sufficiently important place in the evolution of democracy to cause us at this point to give them our attention. Starting with 1815, when the old monarchies beat down Napoleon and the Revolution, a consistent reign of conservatism reestablished itself in Europe. An hereditary king pretty much everywhere maintained a more or less autocratic government and looked for support to the two feudal classes, the clergy and nobility. True, the rise of a trading class had modified this system so far as England was concerned, as early as the seventeenth century (Cromwell and the Puritan revolution) and had secured a place in parliament and the administration to the great city merchants. In France this same class was largely instru