One of the chief consequences of industrialism in Germany is that the people of the country are migrating to the towns.  To the country bumpkin the city is an Eldorado and a lordly pleasure-house.  In truth, he is much better off in it than in the stagnant life of the country.  In the city he sees comfort on every hand, with possibilities of enjoyment of every kind, and if he does not soon get a share of the good things going he grows discontented and turns Socialist.  In the city, too, he learns to think and compare, he perceives the distinction of classes and notices that certain classes have open to them careers from which he is excluded.  Then there is the apparently inevitable antagonism between labour and capital, between the employer and employed, which drives the worker to Social Democracy, as offering the prospect of his becoming his own master and enjoying the whole fruits of his labour.  He may not know Matthew Arnold’s “Sick King in Bokhara,” but he would endorse Arnold’s lines:—­

     “And these all, for a lord
     Eat not the fruit of their own hands;
     Which is the heaviest of all plagues
     To that man’s mind, who understands.”

But whatever its causes, Social Democracy is one of the most curious and anomalous societies extant.  In a country which worships order, it calls for absolute disorder.  A revolutionary movement, it anxiously avoids revolution.  It is a magnificent organization for no apparent practical, direct, or immediate purpose.  Proclaiming the protection of the law and enjoying the blessing of efficient government, it yet refuses to vote the budget to pay for them.  It supports a large parliamentary party without any clear or consistent parliamentary policy in internal or external affairs, unless to be “agin the Government” is a policy.  And lastly, if some of its economic demands are justifiable, and have in several respects been satisfied by modern legislation, its fundamental doctrine, the basis of the entire edifice, is a wild hallucination, sickening to common sense, and completely out of harmony with the progressive economic development of all nations, including its own.

In conclusion, it may be added that the social side of the Social Democracy is perhaps too often unrecognized or ignored by the foreign observer.  Life for the poorer classes in Germany is apt to be more monotonous and dull than for the poorer classes of any country which nature has blessed with more fertility, more sunshine, more diversity of hill and dale, and where people are more mutually sociable and accommodating.  Social Democracy offers something by way of remedy to this:  a field of interest in which the workers can organize and make processions and public demonstrations and can talk and theorize and dispute, and in which the woman can share the interest with the man; or a club, a social club with the largest membership in the world except freemasonry.