The high tide of the foreign millions had ebbed away, showing itself to have been no fructifying Nile but a destructive lava stream, leaving the country charred and desolate after its passage. The gold that only yesterday had poured through greedy fingers, had turned to-day to ashes and withered leaves like the goblin gold of a fairy tales. Diminished inclination for work, an insanely increased demand for the luxuries of life, the accepted ideas of morality shaken to their foundations by scandalous examples of triumphant vice and villainy--these were the blessings that remained after the so-called impetus following on the "Downfall." Work was scarcer, wages lower, but the flood of country people seeking work continued to roll toward the capital, overcoming with irresistible force the backward wave of unfortunates who could find no employment in the building yards, the factories or the workshops, trampling blindly over the bodies of the fallen, like a herd of buffaloes which marches ever straight ahead, which nothing can turn out of its course, and when it arrives at a precipice over which the leaders fall, presses onward till the last one is swallowed up in the depths. The misery and privation became heartrending to witness. Each morning you might see in the working quarters of the town and suburbs hundreds of strong men, their hands--perforce idle--buried in their torn and empty pockets, going from factory to factory asking for work, while the overseers would wave them off from afar to avoid a useless interchange of words. If, in the years of the French milliards, the workingman had turned socialist out of sheer envy and wantonness, he became so now under the sting of adversity, and in all the length and breadth of Berlin there was hardly one of the proletariat who was not a fanatical disciple of the new doctrine, with its slashing denunciations against all that was, and its intoxicating promises of all that was to be. Wilhelm had many opportunities of intercourse with the unemployed. He gave help as far as his fifty marks a day would reach, and kept the wolf from many a door. But the miraculous loaves and fishes of the gospel would have been necessary to successfully alleviate even the distress which he saw with his own eyes, and although much of the preaching of the social democrats still seemed to him mere phrase-making and altogether mistaken, he yet came gradually to the conclusion that somewhere--he did not precisely know where--in the construction of the social machine there must be a flaw, seeing that there were so many people who could and would work, and yet were doomed to despair and ruin for lack of employment. The spring of 1878 came round, and brought with it two attempts on the life of the emperor within three weeks. Scarcely had the people recovered from the horror caused by Hodel's crime when it was shaken to its depths by Nobiling's murderous shot.