If you have ever personally investigated the conditions of the poor in our large cities, or of the village paupers in the country, you have been able to observe the wretched treatment which the poor occasionally receive even in the best managed communities, especially if they are physically weak or crippled.  This happens in the houses of their stepmothers, or relatives of any kind, yes also in those of their nearest of kin.  Knowing this, are you not obliged to confess that every healthy laboring man, who sees such things, must say to himself:  “Is it not terrible that a man is thus degraded in the house which he used to inhabit as master and that his neighbor’s dog is not worse off than he?” Such things do happen.  What protection is there for a poor cripple, who is pushed into a corner, and is not given enough to eat?  There is none.  But if he has as little as 100 or 200 marks of his own, the people will think twice before they oppress him.  We have been in a position to observe this in the case of the military invalids.  Although only five or six dollars are paid every month, this actual cash amounts to something in the household where the poor are boarded, and the thrifty housewife is careful not to offend or to lose the boarder who pays cash.

I, therefore, assure you that we felt the need of insisting by this law on a treatment of the poor which should be worthy of humanity.  Next year I shall be able fully to satisfy Mr. Richter in regard to the amount and the extent of attention which the State will give to a better and more adequate care of all the unemployed.  This will come as a natural consequence, whether or no the present bill is passed.  Today this bill is a test, as it were.  We are sounding to see how deep the waters are, financially, into which we are asking the State and the country to enter.  You cannot guard yourselves against such problems by delivering elegant and sonorous speeches, in which you recommend the improvement of our laws of liability, without in the least indicating how this can be done.  In this way you cannot settle these questions, for you are acting like the ostrich, who hides his head lest he see his danger.  The Government has seen its duty and is facing, calmly and without fear, the dangers which we heard described here a few days ago most eloquently and of which we were given convincing proofs.

We should, however, also remove, as much as possible, the causes which are used to excite the people, and which alone render them susceptible to criminal doctrines.  It is immaterial to me whether or no you will call this Socialism.  If you call it Socialism, you must have the remarkable wish of placing the Imperial Government, in so far as this bill of the allied governments is concerned, in the range of the very critique which Mr. von Puttkamer passed here on the endeavors of the Socialists.  It would then almost seem that with this bill only a very small distance separated us from the murderous band of Hasselmann, the incendiary