[16] Bakunin had a large following in Belgium during the days of the "Old International," and Anarchists have never entirely ceased their activities in the large cities.
[17] On the walls of the "Maison du Peuple" you will find noble paintings. Here labored Constantine Meunier, the sculptor, on his notable "Monument au Travail." Three remarkable sections of this monument, "La Mine," "L'Industrie," "La Glèbe," can be seen in the Gallery of Modern Art, in Brussels. There are evidences everywhere of the art interest of these alert working people. One of them, with sincere indignation, pointed out to me the large pile of stone that surmounts the heights of the city, the Palace of Justice, completed in 1883, and said its "bourgeois Babylonian hideousness is the high-water mark of bourgeois taste in art and bourgeois power in politics."
CHAPTER VII
THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY[ToC]
I
It is the constant complaint of the German Democrats that there is no Liberal Party in Germany. The wars that repeatedly devastated the country during past centuries drove property owners to seek the protection of a strong, centralized government. This habit has survived the centuries. Whenever the middle classes show signs of breaking away from the conservatism of the "Regierung," the Prince always finds a way of bringing them back. The Period of Revolution—1850—ended in a compromise that ignored the workingmen and virtually left absolutism on the throne. When the new era dawned, and Bismarck, like a young giant, shaped the highways of empire, he used the Liberals so adroitly that, when his national legerdemain was accomplished, they were a broken and impotent faction, lost in the conservative reaction of the hour.
Universal suffrage for the Reichstag elections was written into the Constitution of the new empire, not because the Chancellor and his Prince loved democracy, but because the smaller states insisted upon this safeguard against Prussian omnipotence.