woman is entirely under the guardianship of her husband, and her property and earnings are wholly at his disposal. After her children are four years old, she only has as much control over them as the law allows to those grossly immoral or inebriate fathers whose control has had to be supplemented by legally appointed guardians. And after the death of the father, his will or the law may appoint a third person as guardian, who will have equal control with the mother over the children. The father's will may appoint the mother or any other woman as guardian, but the law courts can never appoint a woman. If the mother marries again, she loses all control over her children.

More and more conscious of the injustice of these laws, the leading women, when they found that their deputations to Government were refused a hearing, and that their petitions were only thrown into waste-paper baskets, tried to organise associations for formal protest, but here again the law was against them, and dissolved their associations as having a 'political aim.' And finally, the younger and more active women, whose centre was in Berlin, were forced to see that the slow, cautious development of the earlier movement was accomplishing practically nothing, that their only weapon lay in the franchise, and that they must concentrate all their power on this one single object, agitating for it in every legal way. At about the same time many Christian women publicly joined the movement, and all the religious bodies, except the Catholic and the Jewish, began to show some interest in the advancement of women. It is a long time since the advanced woman necessarily meant an atheist and a free-thinker to the average Englishman, but public opinion in Germany is only now coming to believe that a woman may take an interest in social and political questions and yet still remain a Christian. Finally, last June, and this was a great triumph, a woman was allowed to read a paper on 'The Position of Women' at the Congress of Evangelical Socialists at Erfurt.

Up to this point, all that has been said might, with some exceptions, be taken as a description of the woman movement in England a quarter of a century ago, and it is only when we come to the working women that we find a striking difference, a phenomenon that is absolutely unique in history, that is to say, a woman movement which has originated with the working women themselves. The middle-class women of Germany, having once seen beyond the interests of their own class, have adopted towards working women an attitude which has hitherto been too much that of the medieval Church towards the poor, a service of love rendered cheerfully and willingly, but still condescendingly. Instead of going into social questions, they have taken up charity, and their party has justly been characterised as the ladies'' movement.

But that the working women regard them with a settled suspicion and determined distrust is much less the result of this condescending

attitude than of the point of view of the entire working class in Germany. Since the middle class in Germany did not awake to a full political consciousness until the year 1848, in which year the proletariat also developed a party with strong class interests and class antipathies, they have, at every period of their political activity, dreaded the working class, and withheld from it those political and civil rights from which Democratic Socialism must take its start. Similarly, the women of the middle class did not take up the battle of women's civil rights, and pave the way for the industrial fight of the working women, until the party of the working women themselves had grown conscious of the necessity and possibility of a change, and were ready to agitate for it in their own way. It is this principle of the Klassenkampf, according to which every political party is the party of a class, and every political movement the exclusive movement of a class, which forbids them to co-operate with the bourgeois women. It means nothing to them that the Universities should be open to both sexes, and that numbers of women of the needy middle class should force their way into the ranks of schoolmasters, doctors, or officials. Their goal of admission to the various branches of trade and industry has been practically reached, and, forced by necessity to the severest kinds of labour, they do not demand equality of opportunity, but ask for special legislation and protection. Their lot is thrown in with all other labourers, and they feel that, as the position of woman rises and falls with labour, so the woman question is only one side of the labour question.

The Social Democratic Party, which is the party of labour in Germany, and which includes nearly a quarter of the voters, has not always recognised the equality of women as a necessary part of its programme. At first the working men believed that by restricting the employment of women their own wages could be raised, and their authority in the home as the only wage-earners could be restored. But in spite of all efforts at restriction, and much as it was to be regretted, the employment of women increased rapidly from year to year, and when working men saw that five and a half millions of women were supporting themselves, and out of these over four millions belonging to the proletariat, they realised that women workers were no longer a negligible factor, and that equal duties towards society gave equal rights. At their Parteitag, or Annual Congress, held at Halle in 1890, the Social Democrats therefore passed a resolution demanding the full equality of the sexes in state and society; and the next year, at Brussels, the International Socialists' Congress adopted the same resolution unanimously. After 1892 women were permitted to choose delegates to the Annual Congress, and now the members of the working women's associations are an integral factor of the Social Democratic party, and their demands for equal rights with men are the necessary and logical completion of the democratic programme of the working men.

It would perhaps be more correct to say that theoretically women are an integral factor of the Social Democratic party, for practically their active importance has as yet been very little. This is, of course, largely owing to the restrictions imposed on them by law. If it is hard for middle-class women to find a legal means of carrying on agitation, it is doubly hard for the women of the proletariat. Magistrates and police are always combined to give unjust interpretations of the Coalition Law, where Social Democrats are concerned, and they are especially active in seizing every possible pretext for closing women's associations and meetings. In Berlin, for instance, a number of different associations having been dissolved one after the other, the women formed a small committee of five for purposes of agitation, hoping that a committee could not be interpreted as an association. But the police thought differently, and, after searching the houses of the members of the committee for compromising documents, they had them all brought up and fined in court last May for belonging to a political association. Even a children's Christmas party, only the other day, during the present very severe persecutions of Social Democrats, was forbidden because it was given by Social Democrats and might be considered a meeting of a political association. The agitation is therefore obliged to restrict itself now to the distribution of literature and to the organisation of public meetings. These must always be called by a single person; and the police, one or two of whom are always present on the platform, may limit the speeches and the discussions which follow according to their discretion. If anything is said which they consider illegal, they can, by standing up and putting on their helmets, dissolve the meeting.

But the law cannot be made altogether responsible for the small number of women who, as yet, take an active interest in the political and labour movements. In Hamburg, for instance, where the law is much less strict, though we do indeed find a certain number of women as members of the political associations, yet the number of those who take a part in public life is very small, and they do not form a centre, as would have been expected, of eager interest and agitation, and especially of Trade Unionism, which is particularly powerful in Hamburg. As a matter of fact, and as the numbers show, it seems almost impossible to rouse the women in Hamburg or in other parts of Germany to take a real interest in Trade Unionism. Only 5,251 women are members of Trade Unions, and these figures are very discouraging to the leaders who have been working since the early eighties to rouse the women of their class from the apathy bred of a feeling of helplessness. The leaders themselves are lamentably few, and most of them, being obliged to work long hours to support themselves, are not able to concentrate all their energies on agitation; and, though their personal character and hard-working

enthusiasm cannot be too highly estimated, their lack of education hinders them from taking the large sympathetic view of the movement on which a leader's inspiration depends. It is a great pity that the idea of Klassenkampf, a principle held rigidly by every Social Democrat rather to the bewilderment of an English person, makes it impossible for them to work with the thoughtful earnest leaders of the middle-class woman's movement, many of whom would be only too glad to co-operate with the working women to bring about certain reforms desired by all women. For instance, there is at present under discussion before the Reichstag a draft for a new code of Civil Law for the Empire, which has been compiled by legal experts with a view to unifying the laws of the different states. In adopting that form most widely prevalent and involving the least alteration of existing conditions, they have not realised that reactionary laws are not in accordance with the modern spirit, and they have made the position of women in some points worse than hitherto. The women of the middle classes and the women of the proletariat have organised meetings of protest, and have sent in petition after petition, begging that the new laws might be drafted on new principles, but the lack of unity between them has deprived the movement of that strength which only absolutely solid organisation can give. Again, in the question of factory laws and factory inspection, the middle-class women, unlike the Liberal women of England, have done all that lay in their power to promote the extension of the factory acts, and to have women factory inspectors appointed. All Social Democrats are anxious to promote these laws, believing them to be necessary for the health and for the moral improvement of the working people, and their programme demands a maximum eight hours' day, prohibition of night-work, and of the employment of children under fourteen. And Social Democratic women, preferring the interests of labour to their own narrower interests, are willing therefore, though it may to some extent injure their unrestricted competition with men, that the laws should be made first for themselves, believing that in time they will be extended to men also. Their immediate wish is that the present maximum) work-day of eleven hours for women should be reduced to ten, and that women should not be employed in trades injurious to their health; already women are not allowed to work for four weeks after confinement, nor for the fifth and sixth weeks unless approved by a doctor. But even in the matter of these laws they are not willing to work with the middle-class women. They feel that, though they may both agitate for the same practical reforms in the laws regarding women, yet their own expectations are founded on changes which the middle-class women do not wish for, far more sweeping and fundamental than can be effected by any such surface alterations. They believe that there is and must be war between the classes of society,

that their interests must for ever clash, and that the position of working women, as well as of working men, can only be radically improved when the private ownership of capital is abolished and the means of production are owned collectively.

It is very natural that the middle-class women, while sincerely wishing to improve the economic position of working women, cannot conscientiously agree with this revolutionary doctrine, or that, if able to accept it, they may dread the far-reaching consequences to themselves of joining the Social Democrats. By becoming Social Democrats they would lose their position in society, any situation or paid employment they might have, and, above all, their entire influence with the women of their own class. They would no longer be able to write for the papers of middle-class women, nor speak at their meetings, nor be members of their societies. They would be, in fact, déclassé, and obliged to associate only and entirely with Social Democrats. To any English person, accustomed to meeting Socialists and even anarchists in the most commonplace and bourgeois drawing-rooms, such prejudice and persecution hardly seem possible. And yet they do exist, and necessarily exercise an intimidating influence on the bourgeoisie, though at the same time they are the means of drawing the Social Democrats closer together. But that the antiquated intolerance of German public opinion is responsible for such injustice does not make it any easier for the individual middle-class woman to take the only step that will span the bridge between herself and the women of the proletariat, and a belief that she can do more for these women by working and agitating through her own class can hardly be characterised as cowardice.

But the future of the woman movement in Germany undoubtedly lies with the Social Democratic party, the only strong political party in the world that demands the full equality of the sexes. When the middle-class women make demands, they have no political party to represent them; when the working women wish to agitate for anything, they have forty-seven members of the Reichstag to push their claims. Led by Wilhelm Liebknecht-the friend and one of the earliest disciples of Karl Marx, who has lately, at the age of seventy, been most unjustly condemned to three months' imprisonment-and by August Bebel, the author of Woman, a book which has had enormous influence in Germany, and which has gone through twentyfive editions since its first publication in 1879, the Social Democratic party, though it has not yet attained any of those reforms at which it aims, will undoubtedly control the future developments of German Radicalism, and will never rest until it has secured for German women the most thorough and complete emancipation that they can possibly desire.

ALYS RUSSELL.