Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/79

 have been only an extension to new spheres of already existing protection. Taking children out of the factory, protecting clerks, bookkeepers, house industries, sailors, etc., an extension of a superficial and doubtful character, and not in any way an increasing strengthening of protection where it already existed. When one considers, on the other hand, how remarkably fast the capitalist system of protection extends its sphere, how quickly it leaps from one calling to another, and from one man to another, it will be found that the extension of the protection of labor follows at a much slower pace; that it can never overtake the extension of capitalism, but always comes limping slowly on behind. And while the extension of the latter continually takes on a more rapid pace, the former tends ever more and more to come to a standstill.

If the advance of the protection of labor extensively is so unsatisfactory, intensively we shall find absolutely nothing. In England in 1847, under the pressure of the Chartist movement and the rapid degradation of the textile industry, the ten-hour day was secured for women and children—that is, actually for the whole laboring class of the textile industry. Where have we today an improvement on the ten-hour day?

The Second Republic of France in 1848 fixed the laboring day at ten hours for all the laborers in Paris, and in the remainder of France