Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/64

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NOTES ON DEMOCRACY

rejected, and smallpox spread in the town, The proletariat, alarmed, then proceeded against it by going to Christian Scientists, osteopaths and chiropractors. Precisely the same thing happened in Switzerland.

Turn now to Germany, a country lately delivered from despotism by the arms of altruistic heroes. The social legislation of that country, for more than half a century, afforded a model to all other countries. All the workingmen’s insurance, minimum wage, child labour and other such acts of the United States are bald imitations of it, and in England, before the war, the mountebank Lloyd-George borrowed his whole bag of tricks from it. Well, Dr. Hans Delbrück, in his “Regierung und Volkswille,” tell us that this legislation was fought step by step at home, and with the utmost ferocity, by the beneficiaries of it. When Bismarck formulated it and essayed to get it through the Reichstag he was opposed by every mob-master in the Empire, save only his kept Socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle. The common people were so heavily against him for several years that he had to carry on the government without the consent of the Reichstag—that is, unconstitutionally, and at the risk of his

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