There is a word in frequent use among the workers, which is of striking significance for anyone able to penetrate to the deeper-seated forces active in the human will. It is this: the modern worker has become "class-conscious." He no longer follows, more or less instinctively and unconsciously, the swing of the classes outside his own. He knows himself one of a class apart, and is determined, that the relation, which public life establishes between his class and the other classes, shall be turned to good account for his own interests. And anyone, who has comprehension for the undercurrents of men's souls, finds in the word "class-conscious," as used by the modern worker, a clue to very important facts in the worker's view of life,--in particular amongst those classes of workers, whose life is cast amidst modern technical industry and modern capitalism. What will above all arrest his attention is, how strongly the worker's soul has been impressed and fired by scientific teachings about economic life and its bearing on human destinies. Here one touches on a circumstance about which many people, who only think about the workers, not with them, have very hazy notions,--notions indeed, which are downright mischievous, in view of the serious events taking place at the present day. The view, that the "uneducated" working man has had his head turned by Marxism, and by later labour writers of the Marxist school, and other things one hears of the same sort, will not conduce towards that understanding of the subject and its connection with the whole historic situation of the world, which is so peculiarly necessary at the present day. In expressing such a view, one only shews that one lacks the will to examine an essential feature of the present social movement. For it is an essential feature, that the working-class consciousness has thus become filled with concepts that take their stamp from the scientific evolution of recent times. This class-consciousness continues to be dominated by the note struck in Lassalle's speech on "Science and the Workers." Such things may appear unessential to many a man who reckons himself a "practical person"; but anyone, who means to arrive at a really fruitful insight into the modern labour movement, is bound to turn his attention to these things. In the demands put forward by the workers to-day, be they moderates or radicals, we have the expression, not, as many people imagine, of economic life that has--somehow--become metamorphosed into human impulse, we have the expression of economic science, by which the working-class consciousness is possessed. This stands out clearly in the literature of the labour movement, with its scientific flavour and popular journalistic renderings. To deny this, is to shut one's eyes to actual facts. And it is a fundamental fact, and one which determines the whole social situation at the present day, that everything which forms the subject of the worker's "class-consciousness" is couched