Guild privileges, lack of personal freedom, market privileges and proscription were gradually laid on the shelf in the more advanced states. New mechanical inventions and improvements, especially the invention of the steam engine, and the resultant cheapening of commodities, provided employment for the masses, including also the women. Capitalistic industry was born. Factories, railroads and steamboats were built, mines and foundries, the manufacture of glass and china, the textile industry in its various branches, manufacture of tools and machinery, the building trades, etc., rapidly developed. Universities and polytechnical institutes provided the intellectual forces required by this evolution. The new class that had come into existence, the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, supported by all those who favored progress, insisted upon the abolition of conditions that had become untenable. What had been shaken by the revolution from below during the movement of 1848 and 1849, was finally abolished by the revolution from above in 1866. Political unity, according to the desire of the bourgeoisie, was established, and this was followed by the final overthrow of all the remaining economic and social barriers. Freedom of trade, right of settlement and emigration, and the repeal of laws restricting marriage followed, creating those conditions that capitalism needed for its development. Besides the workingman, woman was the one to profit chiefly by this new development, since it opened up to her new avenues and brought her greater freedom. Even before the new order had been introduced by the transformations of the year 1866, several German states had removed a number of the old, rigid barriers, which caused pedantic reactionaries to predict the destruction of decency and morality. In 1863 the Bishop of Mayence, von Ketteler, lamented that “to abolish the existing barriers to marriage meant the destruction of marriage itself, since now married couples were enabled to leave each other at will.” This lament contains the unintentional confession that in modern marriages the moral bonds are so weak, that man and wife can be kept together only by force. Since marriages now were contracted much more frequently than before this period, a rapid increase of population resulted. This fact, and the fact that the new, rapidly developing industrial system created social problems that had not previously existed, caused the fear of over-population to spring up again, as it did in former periods. It will be shown what this fear of over-population amounts to; we will test its true value. Woman at the Present Day. CHAPTER VII. Woman as a Sex Being. 1.--The Sexual Impulse.