Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/216

 this in spite of the moral and intellectual uplift which has followed every victorious revolution. He says this in Germany, too, where a powerful and necessary uprising would at least have the advantage of abolishing the slavish snobbery of the national mind which has prevailed since the humiliation of the Thirty Years War. And this foolish and senseless sort of preaching is set up in opposition to the most revolutionary party known to history.

It is now about a hundred years since a book appeared in Leipsic which by the beginning of this century had gone through thirty-one editions and which was distributed throughout the towns and the country districts by officials, preachers and humanitarians, of all sorts, and which was universally adopted in the schools as a reader. This book was called, "The Children's Friend" by Rochow. It had the object of teaching the children of the peasant and laboring classes their vocation in life and their duties to their social and political superiors, and making them satisfied with their lot in life, with black bread and potatoes, compulsory servitude, low wages, fatherly beatings and other similar agreeable things. In pursuit of this end, the youth in town and country was informed what a wise provision of nature it was that man was obliged to get his food and enjoyment by means of his labor, and how fortunate the peasant and handworker ought to feel that they were able to spice their food with hard labor while the spendthrift and the picture suffered the pangs of indigestion or lack of appetite. These commonplaces which old Rochow thought good enough for the peasant children of his