As soon as our young people shall have received proper training in our socialistic institutions, and shall have become penetrated with the noble ambition to devote all their energies to the service of the Community, so soon shall we be well able to do without all these snobs and aristocrats. Until such time, however, it is only right and fair that they should stay here with us.
Under these circumstances the Government is to be commended for stringently carrying out its measures to prevent emigration. In order to do so all the more effectually, it has been deemed expedient to send strong bodies of troops to the frontiers, and to the seaport towns. The frontiers towards Switzerland have received especial attention from the authorities. It is announced that the standing army will be increased by many battalions of infantry and squadrons of cavalry. The frontier patrols have strict instructions to unceremoniously shoot down all fugitives.
Our Chancellor is an energetic man, and it is to be hoped he will long continue at the head of affairs.
CHAPTER XVI.
RETIREMENT OF THE CHANCELLOR.
My ardent wish has not been fulfilled. The Chancellor’s resignation has been accepted, and the President of the Chamber has been nominated as his successor. It seems the Cabinet was not able to come to a unanimous determination to accept the responsibility of allowing the Chancellor to engage a few servants for his private convenience. The chief ground for this was, that such an infraction of the principle of social equality would lead to altogether incalculable consequences. Hence the necessity for the reconstruction of the Cabinet. Let us bear in mind the danger we should run of causing the whole socialistic edifice to come tumbling about our ears if only one single essential key-stone were once tampered with. It was in reference to this very identical question of boot-cleaning that Bebel once wrote: “No man is degraded by work, not even when that work consists of cleaning boots. Many a man of high birth has had to find this out in America.”
The Government was strongly inclined to follow the method proposed by Bebel for the solution of this difficulty in practical life, by turning increased attention to the question of getting clothes brushed and boots cleaned by means of machinery. But the prospect of having to wait for suitable machinery to do all such offices for him did not seem at all to the Chancellor’s taste, so he has retired from office.
His successor is stated to be of a more conciliatory, but less energetic, character; a man who is determined not to be obnoxious in any quarter, but to make matters pleasant all round.
With somewhat too much ostentation, the new Chancellor appeared to-day at the State cookshop of his district, duly taking his place in the long row, and dining when it came to his turn. Afterwards he was to be seen, Unter den Linden, with a large bundle of old clothes under his arm, which he was taking to the district repairing-shop to have cleaned and repaired.
CHAPTER XVII.
IN AND ABOUT THE WORKSHOPS.
I am very glad that I have now received the appointment as checker which my friend in office promised me some time ago. I shall no longer have to be employed in the workshop. I only wish Franz had the same good luck, and could get away from his compositor’s desk. Not for one moment that we are above our trades, but I know that Franz feels exactly as I do, and the style in which work is now done in all workshops does not suit Franz and me a bit. One does not work merely for the sake of a bit of bread, and nothing more. Schiller was one of the bourgeois, but notwithstanding this, I always liked those lines of his: