14 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
doxy. Its author, at a time when the altar supported not only the
throne but practically every other institution of the established
order, sought to emancipate human beings from being "the valets
of His Heavenly Majesty." The poet, Georg Herwegh, an
nounced that he was ready for revolution and wrote
Reiszt die Kreuze aus der Erden,
Alle sollen Schwerter werden,
Gott im Himmel wird's vergeben.Alfred Meisner and Karl Beck were active along similar lines in
Austria, the latter publishing a poem entitled "Why Are We
Poor?" Also, radical ideas, which somehow managed to escape the
vigilance of the censors, appeared in some of the papers of Rhenish
Prussia, Hesse, Westphalia, and Frankfurt. These were the in
gredients from which a social revolution could be fashioned.
Needless to add, such challenges to the existing order were
labeled communistic and were carefully watched by the spies and
stool pigeons with which every ruler of consequence surrounded
himself in this age of Metternich's inquisition—censorship of the
press and close scrutiny of the universities and of every other ac
tivity that might jeopardize the "public peace and order" of the
existing "legitimate" governments.^4
Because of the greater unity of the nation, the large amount of
personal liberty which prevailed, and the more advanced state
of invention and the industrial revolution, the reaction of the
British to their "social question" assumed its own characteristic
forms, but the underlying forces were much the same as on the
Continent. The Luddite riots against the introduction of labor-
saving machines had rudely shaken the tranquillity of the upper
classes in Great Britain in the second decade of the nineteenth cen
tury. The years 1802, 1819, 1825, 1829, and 1831 marked the en
actment of factory laws which inaugurated the effort to protect
children from the worst forms of exploitation. The Parliamentary
(^4) See also Georg Adler, Die Geschichte der ersten sozialpolitischen Arbeiter¬
bewegung in Deutschland (Breslau, 1885), passim.