His theory of the State is that of the _Cultur-Staat_, in distinction from the _Polizei-Staat_, and the _Rechts-Staat_. The State can no longer be regarded as merely an omnipotent instrument for the maintenance of tranquillity and order in the name of Heaven; nor even as a constitutional organ of the collective national authority for securing to all individuals and classes in the nation, without exception, the rights and privileges which they are legally recognised to possess; but it must be henceforth looked upon as a positive agency for the spread of universal culture within its geographical territory. With these views, the Socialists of the Chair could not fail to take an active concern with the class of topics thrown up by the socialist movement, and exciting still so much attention in Germany under the name of the social question. They neither state that question nor answer it like the socialists, but their first offence, and the fountain of all their subsequent offending, in the judgment of their Manchester antagonists, consisted in their acknowledgment that there was a social question at all. Not that the Manchester party denied the existence of evils in the present state of industry, but they looked upon these evils as resulting from obstructions to the freedom of competition which time, and time alone, would eventually remove, and from moral causes with which economists had no proper business. The Socialists of the Chair, however, could not dismiss their responsibility for those evils so easily. They owned at once that a social crisis had arisen or was near at hand. The effect of the general adoption of the large system of production had been to diminish the numbers of the middle classes, to reduce the great bulk of the lower classes permanently to the position of wage-labourers, and to introduce some grave elements of peril and distress into the condition of the wage-labourers themselves. They are doubtless better fed, better lodged, better clad, than they were say in the middle and end of last century, when not one in a hundred of them had shoes to his feet, when seven out of eight on the Continent were still bondsmen, and when three out of every four in England had to eke out their wages by parochial relief. But, in spite of these advantages, their life has now less hope and less security than it had then. Industry on the great scale has multiplied the vicissitudes of trade, and rendered the labourer much more liable to be thrown out of work. It has diminished the avenues to comparative independence and dignity which were open to the journeyman under the _régime_ of the small industries. And while thus condemned to live by wages alone all his days, he could entertain no reasonable hope--at least before the formation of trade unions--that his wages could be kept up within reach of the measure of his wants, as these wants were being progressively expanded by the general advance of culture. Moreover, the twinge of the case lies here,