Economic conditions and theories.—Many of the occasions for the benevolent enterprise called the Inner Mission lay in the industrial situation of Germany, and the particular forms of charity were determined by the forms of distress. Germany, at the beginning of this century, was an agricultural country, but it had already entered the circle of manufacturing and commercial competition. The seaport cities naturally shared very early in this movement and in its good and evil effects. The working people had little class consciousness and no voice in public affairs. Those who visited prisons, workhouses, hovels and homes of misery gradually learned how pitiful was the lot of the poor. The usual causes of pauperism and crime, individual and social, were at work. The ancient guild regulation was breaking up. The apprentice could no longer look forward to a secure place and income, however small, but the laborer, boy or man, was still under rigid control. The army of beggars was large and the Elberfeld system of relief had not yet been organized. Serfdom, already practically obsolete, was abolished in Prussia in 1807, but actual release from feudal burdens could not come in a day.
Political.—There was no German Empire, but only a throng of divided jealous states and free cities. Here and there a seer dreamed of national unity. There was no such attempt to popularize government in Germany as in England, France and America. Absolute monarchy was the ideal, and the leading classes hoped to make the centralized and personal government the instrument of progress. Schiller said: "When the people free themselves, prosperity cannot be gained." Goethe did not favor popular movements, but looked to courts for help. The French Revolution had a powerful influence in arousing the middle-class citizens to a consciousness of their rights and powers. A part of Germany, subjected to the yoke of the French conqueror and oppressor, learned to value the privileges conferred on them by the imposed code. Notable reforms attended the abolition of serfdom: freedom of occupation increased; Stein's measures gave to cities and provinces a sense of self-government
