which would have voiced their social demands in quite a different fashion from the modern workers, who can see in the spiritual life, as they have received it, merely an ideology. The workers, as a class, are convinced of the ideologic character of spiritual life; but the conviction renders them more and more unhappy. They are not definitely conscious of this unhappiness in their souls, but they suffer acutely from it, and it far outweighs, in its significance for the social question to-day, all demands for an improvement in external conditions,--justifiable as these demands are too in their own way. The ruling classes do not recognise, that they are themselves the authors of that attitude of mind, which now confronts them militant in the labour-world. And yet, they are the authors of it, inasmuch as, out of their own spiritual world, they failed to bequeath to the workers anything but what must seem to the workers "ideology." What gives to the present social movement its essential stamp, is not the demand for a change of conditions in the life of one class of men,--although that is the natural sign of it. Rather, it is the manner in which this demand is translated by this class from a thought-impulse into actual reality. Consider the facts impartially from this point of view. One will find persons who aim at keeping in touch with labour tendencies in thought, smile at any talk of a spiritual movement proposing to contribute anything towards the solution of the social question. They dismiss it with a smile, as ideology, empty theory. From thought, from the mere life of the spirit, there is nothing, they feel certain, to be contributed to the burning social problems of the hour. And yet, when one looks at the matter more closely, it is forced upon one, that the very nerve, the very root-impulse of the modern movement,--especially as a working-class movement,--does not lie in the things about which the modern worker talks, but in thoughts. The modern working-class movement has sprung, as perhaps no other similar movement in the world before it, out of thoughts. When studied more closely, it shews this in a most marked degree. I am not throwing this out as an aperçu, the result of long pondering over the social movement. If I may venture to introduce a personal remark I was for years lecturer at a working-man's institute, giving instruction to working men in a wide variety of subjects; and I think that it taught me what is living and stirring in the soul of the modern proletarian worker. And from this starting point, I had occasion to go on, and follow up the tendencies at work in the various trades unions and different callings. I think I may say, that I am not approaching the subject merely from theoretical considerations, but am putting into words the results arrived at through actual living experience.