Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/44

 30 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

return to the principles that governed the beautiful Christian civilization which had been in process of formation when the Pagan Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation mutilated and suffocated it. In 1836, three years before Weitling, the tailor of Magdeburg, founded the Hilferuf der deutsclien Kitnsi for the propagation of socialism, the immortal Gorres estab- lished at Munich, in the very teeth of the most fiery of persecu- tions, the Historiscli-politische Blatter, as an organ of Catholic political and social principles. In 1848 Baron von Ketteler, afterward bishop of Mentz, delivered the first of a famous series of discourses on the social question, which gave a tremen- dous impulse to the Christian reaction against political liberal- ism. Since that date an immense network of Catholic societies and institutions, with more or less definite social-economic aims, have sprung up all over Germany, and the great Catholic Center party has arisen, which for many years has been the largest body in the German parliament, and has used its balance of power so wisely and well as to win the admiration of all its rivals. Immense Catholic unions of artisans and peasants now exist, and much assistance is rendered to the cause by the general Catholic societies, like the Pius-Verein, the Volkverein fiir das katlioUscht Dcutschland, and the Borromdusvereiti, which latter, for example, having for its object the circulation of Catholic lit- erature, had in 1895 "o fewer than 1,709 branches, with 61,310 members.

The movement in Germany has a powerful literary repre- sentation. Among the five or six hundred Catholic journals and periodicals, there are a dozen or fifteen special magazine organs of social reform, among which may be mentioned the Christbcli- soziale Blatter, founded in 1867 ; the Arbeiterwohl, founded in 1880 at Cologne; the Arbeiterfreund, published at Munich, Bavaria; and the two organs of the Catholic peasantry of Westphalia, Die Baiieniseitiing and Der westfaliscke Bauer.

The section of legal and social science of the Gorres-Gesell- schaft (founded in 1876 " for the promotion of science in Catholic Germany") published in 1887-97 a Staatslexicoii, ox dictionary of politico-social science, from a Catholic point of view, in five