The German socialists are distinguished by the profundity of their systems. These are not exhausted by a few hours’ study. You can come back to them time and time again, and obtain ever new ideas. A great German economist (Schäffle) declares that it took him years to comprehend the full significance of German socialism. It gives no evidence of decreasing power, but, on the contrary, its influence is manifestly spreading and becoming more and more deeply rooted in the minds and hearts of large masses. Its vitality is due, on the one hand, to the logical and philosophical strength of the systems on which it is based; on the other, to the patience and indomitable perseverance of its leaders. One of its leading characteristics is its thoroughly scientific spirit. Sentimentalism is banished, and a foundation sought in hard, relentless laws, resulting necessarily from the physiological, psychological, and social constitution of man, and his physical environment. Like French socialism, its most prominent side is its negative character, but this is not declamatory. Coldly, passionlessly, laws regulating wages and value are developed, which show that in our present economic society the poverty of laborers and their robbery by capitalists are as inevitable facts as the motions of the planets. Histories, blue books, and statistical journals are searched, and facts are piled on facts, mountain-high, to sustain every separate and individual proposition. Mathematical demonstrations as logical as problems in Euclid take the place of fine periods, perorations, and appeals to the Deity. Political economy is not rejected, but in its strictest and most orthodox form becomes the very corner-stone of the new social structure. No writer is valued so highly as Ricardo, who, in political economy, was the strictest of the strict, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. English political economy is developed to its logical and consistent conclusion with wonderful learning and skill. In the German socialists, says Rudolf Meyer, “we have learned men belonging to the higher mercantile and professional classes, in affluent circumstances, who, out of pure love for the cause, devoted themselves to profound economic investigations, and who united a serious, searching mind with thorough knowledge of history, philology, and law. They are political economists equal to the great English leaders in this study, but having at their command a greater scientific apparatus, especially such as is afforded by statistics.”[155] Roscher, indeed, finds in them alike the strength and the weakness of the English school. He describes them thus in his “History of Political Economy in Germany.” “Some of them seem to be more historical than the Free-trade School, but this is only an appearance, as they apply history so sophistically. As far as doctrinal abstractions are concerned, they are at least equal to the extreme Free-traders.[156] They indulge in the same cosmopolitism,