The hand which never before had held so much money, now learned to clinch itself in hatred against the owner of property, the company promoter; against all in fact who were not of the proletariat.  The Social Democrat had sprung up ten years before from the circle of the intelligent political economists and philosophers of the artisan classes.  Since the war they numbered thousands and ten of thousands, and now began to grow and widen like a moorland fire, at first hardly perceptible, then betraying through the puff of smoke the fire creeping along the ground; then a thousand tongues of flame leap upward, and suddenly sooner or later the whole heath is in a blaze.  Innumerable apostles preaching their turbid doctrines in all the factories and workshops, found hearers who were discontented and easily carried away.  The social democracy of the workmen was neither a political nor economical programme which appealed to the intellect, or could be proved or argued about, but rather an instinct in which religious mysticism, good and bad impulses, needs, emotional desires were wonderfully mingled.  The men were filled with enmity against those who had a large share of money; the new faith dogmatically explained possession of property as a crime—­that it was meritorious to hate the possessor and necessary to destroy him.  They were made discontented with their limited destiny by the sight of the world and its treasures; the new faith promised them a, future paradise in the shape of an equal division of goods—­a paradise in which the hand was permitted to take whatever the eye desired.  They were disgusted by the consciousness of their deformity and roughness, which dragged them down to the lowest rank in the midst of school learning if not exactly knowledge; of good manners if not good breeding; the new faith raised them in their own eyes, declaring that they were the salt of the earth, that they alone were useful and important parts of humanity; all others who did not labor with their hands being miserable and contemptible sponges on humanity.

The whole proletariat was soon converted to Social Democracy.  Berlin was covered with a network of societies, which became the places of worship of the new faith.  Handbills, pamphlets, newspapers, partly polemical, partly literary, in which the mob made their statements and professed their faith stoutly; these, although written very badly, yet by their monotony, their angry reproaches, their invocations, reminded one of litanies and psalms.

Wilhelm felt a certain sympathy with the movement.  It was first brought to his notice by a new acquaintance, who had worked with him in the physical laboratory since the beginning of the year.  He was a Russian, who had introduced himself to the pupils in the laboratory as Dr. Barinskoi from Charkow.  His appearance and, behavior hardly bore this out.  His long thin figure was loosely joined to thin weak legs.  Light blue eyes looked keenly out of a warm grayish-yellow