Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/81

 the opposition of the "ins" and "outs" of the office holders and seekers—was more and more confined to the proletariat. Many sections, even of the proletariat, lost their revolutionary impulse, after the last political upheaval of 1890.

This upheaval abolished the worst expressions of the political repression of the proletariat in Germany and Austria. Somewhat earlier in France the last remnants of the era of persecution after the uprising of the Commune had disappeared.

To be sure, social reform and labor legislation have not gotten on. These belong rather to the period when industrial capitalism had devolped to the point where its destructive effect upon the public health had become so evident as to imperatively demand redress, where industrial capital did not absolutely and entirely rule in state and society, where the little capitalists, land holders and a portion of the intellectuals still stood in sharp antagonism to it, and where also the opinion prevailed that it was still possible to keep the proletariat, that had just begun to become a power, satisfied with a little labor legislation. This was the condition in England during the '40s of the previous century. The most significant measure of all its labor legislation, the ten-hour day for laboring women, became a law in 1847.

Continental Europe lingered far behind. It was not until 1877 that the Swiss enacted a federal factory law fixing a maximum day of eleven hours for men and women. Austria provided for a similar maximum labor day in 1885. The period of upheavals that followed the overthrow of Bismarck brought a few small advances in Germany and France. In 1891 the new German law on industry came, which fixed a maximum eleven hour work day for women, who had hitherto been entirely unprotected. In 1892 this same provision was introduced into France.