Here was a baker with pale face and inflamed eyelids, coughing badly—­consumptive, in consequence of the dust from the flour—­his eyes affected by the heat of the oven.  Here was a man who had lost a finger of his left hand—­the victim of a cloth loom; and here a pallid-looking man, showing when he spoke or laughed slate-colored gums—­a case of lead-poisoning, with a painful death as the inevitable result.  And it seemed as if over all these cripples and sickly people the Genius of Work hovered as the black angel of Eastern stories, tracing on their foreheads with his brush—­on this one mutilation, on this one an early death.  Schrotter’s observations and explanations placed the whole meeting in a different light to Wilhelm.  The coarseness of the men, even the dirt on their hands and faces, touched him like a reproach, and in their jokes and laughter he seemed to hear a bitter cry.

A reproach, a complaint against whom?  Against the capitalists, or against inexorable fate?  Wilhelm asked himself whether the conditions of labor were attributable to men, or were not the result of cruel necessity?  Could the capitalist be responsible for the accidents of machines, the dust from flour, the splitting of iron?  If these workmen had not been one-eyed or consumptive could they have performed their work for the commonweal?  Was it not true that if mankind would not renounce its claims to bread and other necessities, it must pay for the satisfaction of wants with the tribute of health and life? that every comfort, every pleasure added to existence was paid for by human sacrifice? that the masks of tragedy worn at this meeting were merely the corporate expressions of a law which united development and progress with pain and destruction?  In this case the whole socialist programme was manifestly wrong, and the sum of the workman’s grievances was not the result of the economical arrangements of society, but of the eternal conditions of civilization, that the theory of the methods of labor and their amelioration was not the expectation of an equal division of property, but rather of the contrivances of the inventor.

While Wilhelm was absorbed in these reflections the first speaker of the evening appeared on the platform, a little dapper man, restless as quicksilver, with long hair, large mouth, and a shrill voice.  He opened the meeting with an extraordinary volubility, in a whirl of pantomimic gesture and excitement, violently denouncing the capitalists; “infamous bloodsuckers” as he called them.  He painted hopelessly confused pictures, with constant faults of grammar—­of the hard fate of the workingman, and the black treachery of the property-owning classes.  They were slaveowners who paid them their daily wages by shearing the wool off their backs, and enjoyed riotous luxury themselves while the poor destitute ones were engulfed in a chasm of misery.  The workman must possess the fruit of his labor himself, like the bird in the air, or