In treating of these schemes I have brought the external history of social democracy down to the present moment, for they are to-day being discussed in Germany. They are viewed with the deepest distrust by large classes of the population, and Parliament has greeted them coolly. Were they accepted, they alone would not be sufficient to cure so deep-seated a disease; perhaps they would scarcely mitigate it. Radical changes, not to be hoped for in our lifetime, must take place before the conflict between capitalist and laborer—between rich and poor—will cease to disturb the peace of Christendom. The evil is rooted in the very nature of society itself, and can only terminate in a transformation and moral elevation of the various social elements. Its cause lies deeper than the agitation of Karl Marx or the eloquence of Ferdinand Lassalle, who only acted upon latent feelings and expressed thoughts, of which the laborers had already a dim consciousness. Sooner or later their feelings were bound to become active and their thoughts to find adequate expression. Roscher, in his “Political Economy,” describes five conditions which, meeting together, produce communistic and socialistic movements. As his description of them has become celebrated, and explains not the mere surface phenomena, but the underlying causes of communism and socialism, I think it worth while to present them. I shall, however, take the liberty of making abbreviations and changes, and interspersing such remarks of my own as will better adapt the description to the purpose of this volume. The first condition is “a well-defined confrontation of rich and poor. So long as there is a middle-class of considerable numbers between them, the two extremes are kept, by its moral force, from coming into collision. There is no greater preservative against envy of the superior classes and contempt for the inferior than the gradual and unbroken fading of one class of society into another.... But when the rich and the poor are separated by an abyss which there is no hope of ever crossing, how pride, on the one side, and envy, on the other, rage! and especially in the centres of industry, the great cities, where the deepest misery is found side by side with the most brazen-faced luxury, and where the wretched themselves, conscious of their numbers, mutually excite their own bad passions. It cannot, unfortunately, be denied that when a nation has attained the acme of its development we find a multitude of tendencies prevailing to make the rich richer and the poor, at least relatively, poorer, and thus to diminish the number of the middle-class from both sides; unless, indeed, remedial influences are brought to bear and to operate in a contrary direction.”