and forgets that the increasing pretentiousness in the lower classes is only a reflex of the rising standard of life in the upper, that it is their own example which has inflamed the covetousness of the workers.
That the standard of life in the bourgeoisie rises faster than among the workers, can be seen at every step. The working class dwellings have, during the last fifty years, not improved to any great extent, whilst the dwellings of the bourgoisie to-day are magnificent in comparison with an average bourgeois house of fifty years ago. A third-class railway carriage of to-day and one of fifty years ago, are not so very different in their internal appointments. But compare a first-class carriage of the middle of last century with the modern Pullman cars.[1] I do not believe that the seaman in an ocean steamer is to-day much better off than fifty years ago. But certainly the luxury of a saloon of a modern passenger boat was a thing undreamt of even in royal yachts fifty years ago.
So much about the increasing exploitation of the worker. But is not this economic factor neutralised by the two classes drawing increasingly nearer to each other on the political field? Is not the worker more and more recognised by the bourgeois as equal to himself?
Undoubtedly the proletariat gains rapidly in political and social respect.
If its economic advancement has been outdistanced by that oi the bourgeoisie, and must in consequence necessarily give rise to an increasing covetousness and dissatisfaction, the most remarkable feature of the last fifty years has, on the contrary, been the steady and uninterrupted advancement of the proletariat in moral and intellectual respects.
Only a few decades ago the proletariat stood at such a low level, that there were even Socialists who expected from a victory of the proletariat the worst results for civilisation. After 1850 Rodbertus wrote: "There is a very great danger at hand lest a new barbarism, this time arising from the midst of society itself, lays waste the abodes of civilisation and of wealth."
At the same time Heinrich Heine declared that the future belonged to the Communists. "This admission—that the future belongs to the Communists—I made in a spirit of uneasiness and greatest anxiety, and ugh! that was by no means dissimulation on my part. I actually could only think with fear and horror of the time, when those dark iconoclasts would attain to power; with
- ↑ This can hardly be said to apply to England—e.g., the G.N.R. or the L. and N.W.R. with their third-class dining cars, &c. Of course, that is in consequence of the tendency which was so strongly noticeable on our railways in the direction of a single class, or, at the most, two classes. Prussia still has four, and of the fourth it is quite safe to say that, short of having no roof, it could not be worse.—Translator.
