Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/73

Rh chapters Work in the Factory, and The Material Condition of my Fellow-Workmen, the American student and operative will recognize abuses still existing in Germany which our more progressive establishments have eliminated. The contrast also in rates of wages and quality of living with wage-earners in America will excite sympathy, but will also weld the American more firmly to the belief that the condition of the wage-earner in this country is a happy and fortunate one by comparison; that its stability must not be jeopardized by countenancing socialistic agitation.

In the chapters on Political Tendencies of my Fellow-Workmen and Social Democracy the student of industrial sociology will find much valuable information. In the chapters on Moral Conditions, and Education and Religion, ethical questions are plainly discussed. The final chapter, on Results and Demands, will interest all readers. It is shown that the labor question is not merely a wage question with the vast majority of the laboring class. It is only one factor in the movement—perhaps the most tangible, but not the most important or determinative one. "There is an ardent longing on the part of the whole class of factory labor for more respect and recognition, for greater actual and social equality in addition to the formal and political equality which is theirs already. . . . It is the irresistible impulse to a larger intellectual freedom, the craving for the benefits of knowledge and education, and for a fuller understanding of those high and lofty problems of the human soul which, despite the universal pursuit of wealth and externals, rise up before humanity today, new riddles in new forms. All this, rough, discordant, full