We come now to the movement already alluded to as a set-off and, within certain boundaries at least, a counteractive of the degeneracy exhibited in the German character since the foundation of the present Imperial system. The rise and rapid growth of the Social Democratic movement is perhaps the most striking fact in the recent history of Germany. The same may be said, of course, of the growth of Socialism everywhere during the same period. But in Germany it has for a generation past, or even more, occupied an exceptional position, alike as regards the rapidity of its increase, its direct influence on the masses, and its party organization. Modern Socialism, as a party doctrine, is, moreover, a product of the best period of nineteenth-century German thought and literature. Its three great theoretical protagonists, Marx, Engels, and their younger contemporary, Lassalle, all issued from the great Hegelian movement of the first half of the nineteenth century. Their propagandist activity, literary and otherwise, was in the German language. The analysis of the present capitalist system, forming the foundation of the demand for the communization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, as resulting in a _human_ society as opposed to a _class_ society, and ultimately in the extinction of national barriers in a world-federation of socialized humanity--these principles were first appreciated, as a world-ideal, by the proletariat of Germany, and they have unquestionably raised that proletariat to an intellectual rank as yet equalled by no other working-class in the world.