Visits to wine and beer-houses and dancing-rooms were
endlessly multiplied, and everything had the golden foundation which
the proverb of an age of simplicity hardly attributed to honorable
handicraft. Profits were squandered in drink; life was a rush and a
riot without end.
But curiously, in the same degree in which the opportunities of work
were increased and wages became higher, life everywhere easier, and
the ordinary enjoyments greater; just so did the workman grow
discontented. Desires increased with their gratification, and envy
measured its own prosperity by the side of the luxury of the
nouveaux riches.
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.
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