The rise of machinery, the application of the natural sciences to the process of production, the new roads of commerce and traffic burst asunder the last vestiges of the old system. The guild privileges, the personal restrictions, the mark and jurisdictional rights, together with all that thereby hung, walked into the lumber room. The strongly increased need of labor-power did not rest content with the men, it demanded woman also as a cheaper article. The conditions that had become untenable, had to fall; and they fell. The time thereto,--long wished-for by the newly risen class, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class--arrived the moment Germany gained her political unity. The capitalist class demanded imperiously the unhampered development of all the social forces; it demanded this for the benefit of its own capitalist interests, that, at that time, and, to a certain degree, were also the interests of the large majority. Thus came about the liberty of trade, the liberty of emigration, the removal of the barriers to marriage,--in short, that whole system of legislation that designates itself "liberal." The old-time reactionists expected from these measures the smash-up of morality. The late Adolph Ketteler of Mainz moaned, already in 1865, accordingly, before the new social legislation had become general, "that the tearing down of the existing barriers to matrimony meant the dissolution of wedlock, it being now possible for the married to run away from each other at will." A pretty admission that the moral bonds of modern marriage are so weak, that only _compulsion_ can be relied on to hold the couple together.