The misery
and privation became heartrending to witness. Each morning you might
see in the working quarters of the town and suburbs hundreds of
strong men, their hands--perforce idle--buried in their torn and
empty pockets, going from factory to factory asking for work, while
the overseers would wave them off from afar to avoid a useless
interchange of words. If, in the years of the French milliards, the
workingman had turned socialist out of sheer envy and wantonness, be
became so now under the sting of adversity, and in all the length
and breadth of Berlin there was hardly one of the proletariat who
was not a fanatical disciple of the new doctrine, with its slashing
denunciations against all that was, and its intoxicating promises of
all that was to be. Wilhelm had many opportunities of intercourse
with the unemployed. He gave help as far as his fifty marks a day
would reach, and kept the wolf from many a door. But the miraculous
loaves and fishes of the gospel would have been necessary to
successfully alleviate even the distress which he saw with his own
eyes, and although much of the preaching of the social democrats
still seemed to him mere phrase-making and altogether mistaken, he
yet came gradually to the conclusion that somewhere--he did not
precisely know where--in the construction of the social machine
there must be a flaw, seeing that there were so many people who
could and would work, and yet were doomed to despair and ruin for
lack of employment.
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