Similarly in Nuerenberg, Ulm, Leipsic, Cologne, Frankfurt and elsewhere.
In Ulm, where the "houses of women" were abolished in 1537, the guilds moved in 1551 that they be restored "in order to avoid worse disorders."
Distinguished foreigners were provided with _filles de joie_ at the expense of the city. When King Ladislaus entered Vienna in 1452, the Magistrate sent to meet him a deputation of public girls, who, clad only in light gauze, revealed the handsomest shapes. At his entry into Brugges, the Emperor Charles V was likewise greeted by a deputation of naked girls. Such occurrences met not with objection in those days.
Imaginative romancers, together with calculating people, have endeavored to represent the Middle Ages as particularly "moral," and animated with a veritable worship for woman. The period of the Minnesangers--from the twelfth to the fourteenth century--contributed in giving a color to the pretence. The knightly "Minnedienst" (service of love) which the French, Italian and German knights first became acquainted with among the Moriscos of Spain, is cited as evidence concerning the high degree of respect in which woman was held at that time. But there are several things to be kept in mind. In the first place, the knights const.i.tuted but a trifling percentage of the population, and, proportionately, the knights" women of the women in general; in the second place, only a very small portion of the knights exercised the so-called "Minnedienst;"
thirdly, the true nature of this service is grossly misunderstood, or has been intentionally misrepresented. The age in which the "Minnedienst" flourished was at the same time the age of the grossest right-of-the-fist in Germany,--an age when all bonds of order were dissolved; and the knights indulged themselves without restraint in waylaying of travelers, robbery and incendiarism. Such days of brutal force are not the days in which mild and poetic sentiments are likely to prevail to any perceptible extent. The contrary is true. This period contributed to destroy whatever regard possibly existed for the female s.e.x. The knights, both of country and town, consisted mainly of rough, dissolute fellows, whose princ.i.p.al pa.s.sion, besides feuds and guzzling, was the unbridled gratification of s.e.xual cravings. The chronicles of the time do not tire of telling about the deeds of rapine and violence, that the n.o.bility was guilty of, particularly in the country, but in the cities also, where, appearing in patrician _role_, the n.o.bility held in its hands the city regiment, down to the thirteenth, and partly even in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Nor did the wronged have any means of redress; in the city, the squires (yunker) controlled the judges" bench; in the country, the landlord, invested with criminal jurisdiction, was the knight, the Abbot or the Bishop. Accordingly, it is a violent exaggeration that, amid such morals and customs, the n.o.bility and rulers had a particular respect for their wives and daughters, and carried them on their hands as a sort of higher beings, let alone that they cultivated such respect for the wives and daughters of the townsmen and peasants, for whom both the temporal and the spiritual masters entertained and proclaimed contempt only.
A very small minority of knights consisted of sincere worshippers of female beauty, but their worship was by no means Platonic; it pursued quite material ends. And these material ends were pursued by those also with whom Christian mysticism, coupled with natural sensuousness, made a unique combination. Even that harlequin among the worshippers of "lovely women," Ulrich von Lichtenstein, of laughable memory, remained Platonic only so long as he had to. At bottom the "Minnedienst" was the apotheosis of the best beloved--at the expense of the own wife; _a sort of hetairism, carried over into Middle Age Christianity_, as it existed in Greece at the time of Pericles. In point of fact, during the Middle Ages, the mutual seduction of one another"s wives was a "Minnedienst"
strongly in vogue among the knights, just the same as, in certain circles of our own bourgeoisie, similar performances are now repeated.
That much for the romanticism of the Middle Ages and their regard for women.
There can be no doubt that, in the open recognition of the pleasures of the senses, there lay in that age the acknowledgment that the natural impulses, implanted in every healthy and ripe human being, are ent.i.tled to be satisfied. In so far there lay in the demonstration a victory of vigorous nature over the asceticism of Christianity. On the other hand, it must be noted that the recognition and satisfaction fell to the share of only one s.e.x, while the other s.e.x, on the contrary, was treated as if it could not and should not have the same impulses; the slightest transgression of the laws of morality prescribed by man, was severely punished. The narrow and limited horizon, within which moved the citizen of the Middle Ages, caused him to adopt narrow and limited measures also with respect to the position of woman. And, as a consequence of continued oppression and peculiar education, woman herself has so completely adapted herself to her master"s habits and system of thought, that she finds her condition natural and proper.
Do we not know that there have been millions of slaves who found slavery natural, and never would have freed themselves, had their liberators not risen from the midst of the cla.s.s of the slave-holders?
Did not Prussian peasants, when, as a result of the Stein laws, they were to be freed from serfdom, pet.i.tion to be left as they were, "because who was to take care of them when they fell sick?" And is it not similarly with the modern Labor Movement? How many workingmen do not allow themselves to be influenced and led without a will of their own?
The oppressed needs the stimulator and firer, because he lacks the independence and faculty for initiative. It was so with the modern proletarian movement; it is so also in the struggle for the emanc.i.p.ation of woman, which is intimately connected with that of the proletariat.
Even in the instance of the comparatively favorably situated bourgeois of old, n.o.ble and clerical advocates broke the way open for him to conduct his battle for freedom.
However numerous the shortcomings of the Middle Ages, there was then a healthy sensualism, that sprang from a rugged and happy native disposition among the people, and that Christianity was unable to suppress. The hypocritical prudery and bashfulness; the secret l.u.s.tfulness, prevalent to-day, that hesitates and balks at calling things by their right name, and to speak about natural things in a natural way;--all that was foreign to the Middle Ages. Neither was that age familiar with the piquant double sense, in which, out of defective naturalness and out of a prudery that has become morality, things that may not be clearly uttered, are veiled, and are thereby rendered all the more harmful; such a language incites but does not satisfy; it suggests but does not speak out. Our social conversation, our novels and our theatres are full of these piquant equivoques,--and their effect is visible. This spiritualism, which is not the spiritualism of the transcendental philosopher, but that of the _roue_, and that hides itself behind the spiritualism of religion, has great power to-day.
The healthy sensualism of the Middle Ages found in Luther its cla.s.sic interpreter. We have here to do, not so much with the religious reformer, as with Luther the man. On the human side, Luther"s robust primeval nature stepped forward unadulterated; it compelled him to express his appet.i.te for love and enjoyment forcibly and without reserve. His position, as former Roman Catholic clergyman, had opened his eyes. By personal practice, so to speak, had he learned the unnaturalness of the life led by the monks and nuns. Hence the warmth with which he warred against clerical and monastic celibacy. His words hold good to this day, for all those who believe they may sin against nature, and imagine they can reconcile with their conceptions of morality and propriety, governmental and social inst.i.tutions that prevent millions from fulfilling their natural mission. Luther says: "Woman, except as high and rare grace, can dispense with man as little as she can with food, sleep, water and other natural wants. Conversely, also, neither can man dispense with woman. The reason is this: It is as deeply implanted in nature to beget children as to eat and drink.
Therefore did G.o.d furnish the body with members, veins, discharges and all that is needed therefor. He who will resist this, and prevent its going as Nature wills, what else does he but endeavor to resist Nature"s being Nature, that fire burn, water wet, that man eat, drink or sleep?"
And in his sermon on married life he says: "As little as it is in my power that I be not a man, just so little is it in your power to be without a man. For it is not a matter of free will or deliberation, but a necessary, natural matter that all that is male must have a wife, and what is female must have a husband." Luther did not speak in this energetic manner in behalf of married life and the necessity of s.e.xual intercourse only; he also turns against the idea that marriage and Church have anything in common. In this he stood squarely on the ground of the olden days, which considered marriage an act of free will on the part of those who engaged in it, and that did not concern the Church. On this head he said: "Know, therefore, that marriage is an outside affair, as any other earthly act. The same as I am free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, ride, deal, speak and trade with a heathen, a Jew, a Turk or a heretic, _likewise am I free to enter into and remain in wedlock with one of them. Turn your back upon the fool laws that forbid such a thing_.... A heathen is a man and woman, created by G.o.d in perfect form, as well as St. Peter and St. Paul and St. Luke; be then silent for a loose and false Christian that you are." Luther, like other Reformers, p.r.o.nounced himself against all limitation of marriage, and he was for also allowing the re-union of divorced couples, against which the Church was up in arms. He said: "As to the manner in which marriage and divorce are to be conducted among us, I claim that it should be made the business of the jurists, and placed under the jurisdiction of earthly concerns, because marriage is but an earthly and outside matter." It was in keeping with this view that, not until the close of the seventeenth century, was marriage by the Church made obligatory under Protestantism.
Until then so-called "conscience marriage" held good, i. e., the simple mutual obligation to consider each other man and wife, and to mean to live in wedlock. Such a marriage was considered by German law to be legally entered into. Luther even went so far that he conceded to the unsatisfied party--even if that be the woman--the right to seek satisfaction outside of the marriage bonds "in order to satisfy nature, which cannot be crossed."[47] This conception of marriage is the same that prevailed in antiquity, and that came up later during the French Revolution. Luther here set up maxims that will arouse the strongest indignation of a large portion of our "respectable men and women," who, in their religious zeal, are so fond of appealing to him. In his treatise "On Married Life,"[48] he says: "If an impotent man falls to the lot of a hearty woman, and she still cannot openly take another, and does not wish to marry again, she shall say unto her husband: "Lo, dear husband, thou shalt not be wronged by me. Thou hast deceived me and my young body, and hast therefore brought my honor and salvation into danger. There is no glory to G.o.d between us two. Grant me to cohabit secretly with thy brother or nearest friend, and thou shalt have the name, _so that thy property come not to strange heirs; and allow thyself to be, in turn, willingly deceived by me, as thou did deceive me without thy will_." The husband, Luther goes on to show, is in duty bound to grant the request. "If he declines, then has she the right to run away from him to another, and to woo elsewhere. Conversely, if a woman declines to exercise the conjugal duty, her husband has the right to cohabit with another, only he should tell her so beforehand."[49] It will be seen that these are wonderfully radical, and, in the eyes of our days, so rich in hypocritical prudery, even downright "immoral" views, that the great Reformer develops. Luther, however, expressed only that which, at the time, was the popular view.[50]
The pa.s.sages quoted from the writings and addresses of Luther on marriage, are of special importance for the reason that these views are in strong contradiction with those that prevail to-day in the Church. In the struggle that it latterly has had to conduct with the clerical fraternity, the Social Democracy can appeal with full right to Luther, who takes on the question of marriage a stand free from all prejudice.
Luther and all the Reformers went even further in the marriage question, true enough, only for opportunist reasons, and out of complaisance towards the Princes whose strong support and permanent friendship they sought to secure and keep to the Reformation. The friendly Duke of Hessen, Philip I, had, besides his legitimate wife, a sweetheart, willing to yield to his wishes, but only under the condition that he marry her. It was a th.o.r.n.y problem. A divorce from the wife, in the absence of convincing reasons, would give great scandal; on the other hand, a marriage with two women at a time was an unheard of thing with a Christian Prince of modern days; it would give rise to no less a scandal. All this notwithstanding, Philip, in his pa.s.sion, decided in favor of the latter step. The point was now to establish that the act did no violence to the Bible, and to secure the approval of the Reformers, especially of Luther and Melanchthon. The negotiations, set on foot by the Duke, began first with Butzer, who declared himself in favor of the plan, and promised to win over Luther and Melanchthon.
Butzer justified his opinion with the argument: To possess several wives at once was not against the evangelium. St. Paul, who said much upon the subject of who was not to inherit the kingdom of G.o.d, made no mention of those who had two wives. St. Paul, on the contrary, said "that a Bishop was to have but one wife, the same with his servants; hence, if it had been compulsory that every man have but one wife he would have so ordered, and forbidden a plurality of wives." Luther and Melanchthon joined this reasoning, and gave their a.s.sent to double marriages, after the Duke"s wife herself had consented to the marriage with the second wife under the condition "that he was to fulfil his marital duties towards her more than ever before."[51] The question of the justification of bigamy had before then--at the time when the issue was the consenting to the double marriage of Henry VIII of England--caused many a headache to Luther, as appears from a letter to the Chancellor of Saxony, Brink, dated January, 1524. Luther wrote to him that, _in point of principle, he could not reject bigamy_ because it ran not counter to Holy Writ;[52] but that he held it scandalous when the same happened among Christians, "who should leave alone even things that are permissible." After the wedding of the Duke, which actually took place in March, 1540, and in answer to a letter of acknowledgment from him, Luther wrote (April 10): "That your Grace is happy on the score of our opinion, _which we fain would see kept secret; else, even the rude peasants_ (in imitation of the Duke"s example) might finally produce as strong, if not stronger, reasons, whereby we might then have much trouble on our hands."
Upon Melanchthon, the consent to the double marriage of the Duke must have been less hard. Before that, he had written to Henry VIII "every Prince has the right to introduce polygamy in his domains." But the double marriage of the Duke made such a great and unpleasant sensation, that, in 1541, he circulated a treatise in which polygamy is defended as no transgression against Holy Writ.[53] People were not then living in the ninth or twelfth century, when polygamy was tolerated without shocking society. Social conditions had very materially changed in the meantime; in a great measure the mark had had to yield to the power of the n.o.bility and the clergy; it had even extensively disappeared, and was further uprooted after the unhappy issue of the Peasant Wars.
Private property had become the general foundation of society. Beside the rural population, that cultivated the soil, a strong, self-conscious handicraft element had arisen, and was dominated by the interests of its own station. Commerce had a.s.sumed large dimensions, and had produced a merchant cla.s.s, which, what with the splendor of its outward position and its wealth, awoke the envy and hostility of a n.o.bility that was sinking ever deeper into poverty and licentiousness. The burghers"
system of private property had triumphed everywhere, as was evidenced by the then universal introduction of the Roman law; the contrasts between the cla.s.ses were palpable, and everywhere did they b.u.mp against one another. Monogamy became, under such conditions, the natural basis for the s.e.xual relations; a step such as taken by the Duke of Hessen now did violence to the ruling morals and customs, which, after all, are but the form of expression of the economic conditions that happen at the time to prevail. On the other hand, society came to terms with prost.i.tution, as a necessary accompaniment of monogamy, and an inst.i.tution supplemental thereto;--and tolerated it.
In recognizing the gratification of the s.e.xual impulses as a law of Nature, Luther but uttered what the whole male population thought, and openly claimed for itself. He, however, also contributed--through the Reformation, which carried through the abolition of celibacy among the clergy, and the removal of the cloisters from Protestant territories--that to hundreds of thousands the opportunity was offered to do justice to nature"s impulses under legitimate forms. True again,--due to the existing order of property, and to the legislation that flowed therefrom,--hundreds of thousands of others continued to remain excluded. The Reformation was the first protest of the large-propertied bourgeois or capitalist cla.s.s, then rising into being, against the restrictions imposed by feudalism in Church, State and society. It strove after freedom from the narrow bonds of the guild, the court and the judiciary; it strove after the centralization of the State, after the abolition of the numerous seats of idlers, the monasteries; and it demanded their use for practical production. The movement aimed at the abolition of the feudal form of property and production; it aimed at placing in its stead the free property of the capitalist, i. e., in the stead of the existing system of mutual protection in small and disconnected circles, there was to be unchained the free individual struggle of individual efforts in the compet.i.tion for property.
On the religious field, Luther was the representative of these bourgeois aspirations. When he took a stand for the freedom of marriage, the question could not be simply about civic marriage, which was realized in Germany only in our own age through the civil laws and the legislation therewith connected,--freedom to move, freedom of pursuit, and freedom of domicile. In how far the position of woman was thereby improved will be shown later. Meanwhile things had not matured so far at the time of the Reformation. If, through the regulations of the Reformation many were afforded the possibility to marry, the severe persecutions that followed later hampered the freedom of s.e.xual intercourse. The Roman Catholic clergy having in its time displayed a certain degree of tolerance, and even laxity, towards s.e.xual excesses, now the Protestant clergy, once itself was provided for, raged all the more violently against the practice. War was declared upon the public "houses of women;" they were closed as "Holes of Satan;" the prost.i.tutes were persecuted as "daughters of the devil;" and every woman who slipped was placed on the pillory as a specimen of all sinfulness.
Out of the once hearty small property-holding bourgeois of the Middle Ages, who lived and let live, now became a bigoted, straight-laced, dark-browed maw-worm, who "saved-up," to the end that his large property-holding bourgeois successor might live all the more l.u.s.tily in the nineteenth century, and might be able to dissipate all the more. The respectable citizen, with his stiff necktie, his narrow horizon and his severe code of morals, was the prototype of society. The legitimate wife, who had not been particularly edified by the sensuality of the Middle Ages, tolerated in Roman Catholic days, was quite at one with the Puritanical spirit of Protestantism. But other circ.u.mstances supervened, that, affecting, as they did, unfavorably the general condition of things in Germany, joined in exercising in general an unfavorable influence upon the position of woman.
The revolution--effected in production, money and trade, particularly as regarded Germany,--due to the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies, produced, first of all, a great reaction on the social domain. Germany ceased to be the center of European traffic and commerce. Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, took successively the leadership, the latter keeping it until our own days. German industry and German commerce began to decline. At the same time, the religious Reformation had destroyed the political unity of the nation. The Reformation became the cloak under which the German princ.i.p.alities sought to emanc.i.p.ate themselves from the Imperial power. In their turn, the Princes brought the power of the n.o.bility under their own control, and, in order to reach this end all the more easily, favored the cities, not a few of which, in sight of the ever more troubled times, placed themselves, of their own free will, under the rule of the Princes. The final effect was that the bourgeois or capitalist cla.s.s, alarmed at the financial decline of its trade, raised ever higher barriers to protect itself against unpleasant compet.i.tion. The ossification of conditions gained ground; and with it the impoverishment of the ma.s.ses.
Later, the Reformation had for a consequence the calling forth of the religious wars and persecutions--always, of course, as cloaks for the political and economic purposes of the Princes--that, with short interruptions, raged throughout Germany for over a century, and ended with the country"s complete exhaustion, at the close of the Thirty Years" War in 1648. Germany had become an immense field of corpses and ruins; whole territories and provinces lay waste; hundreds of cities, thousands of villages had been partially or wholly burnt down; many of them have since disappeared forever from the face of the earth. In other places the population had sunk to a third, a fourth, a fifth, even to an eighth and tenth part. Such was the case, for instance, with cities like Neurenberg, and with the whole of Franconia. And now, at the hour of extreme need, and with the end in view of providing the depopulated cities and villages as quickly as possible with an increased number of people, the drastic measure was resorted to of "raising the law," and _allowing a man two wives_. The wars had carried off the men; of women there was an excess. On February 14, 1650, the Congress of Franconia, held in Nuerenberg, adopted the resolution that "men under sixty years of age shall not be admitted to the monasteries;" furthermore, it ordered "the priests and curates, if not ordained, and the canons of religious establishments, shall marry;" "moreover every male shall be allowed to marry two wives; and all and each males are earnestly reminded, and shall be often warned, _from the pulpit_ also, to so comport themselves in this matter; and care shall be taken that he shall fully and with becoming discretion diligently endeavor, so that, as a married man, to whom is granted that he take two wives, he not only take proper care of both wives, but avoid all misunderstanding among them."
At that time, we see, matters that are to-day kept under strictest secrecy, were often discussed as of course from the pulpit itself.
But not commerce alone was at a standstill. Traffic and industry had been extensively ruined during this protracted period; they could recover only by little and little. A large part of the population had become wild and demoralized, disused to all orderly occupations. During the wars, it was the robbing, plundering, despoiling and murdering armies of mercenaries, which crossed Germany from one end to the other, that burned and knocked down friend and foe alike; after the wars, it was countless robbers, beggars and swarms of vagabonds that threw the population into fear and terror, and impeded and destroyed commerce and traffic. For the female s.e.x, in particular, a period of deep suffering had broken. Contempt for woman had made great progress during the times of license. The general lack of work weighed heaviest on their shoulders; by the thousands did these women, like the male vagabonds, infest the roads and woods, and filled the poorhouses and prisons of the Princes and the cities. On top of all these sufferings came the forcible ejectment of numerous peasant families by a land-hungry n.o.bility.
Compelled, since the Reformation, ever more to bend before the might of the Princes, and rendered ever more dependent upon these through court offices and military posts, the n.o.bility now sought to recoup itself double and threefold with the robbery of peasant estates for the injury it had sustained at the hand of the Princes. The Reformation offered the Princes the desired pretext to appropriate the rich Church estates, which they swallowed in innumerable acres of land. The Elector August of Saxony, for instance, had turned not less than three hundred clergy estates from their original purpose, up to the close of the sixteenth century.[54] Similarly did his brothers and cousins, the other Protestant Princes, and, above all, the Princes of Brandenburg. The n.o.bility only imitated the example by bagging peasant estates, that had lost their owners, by ejecting free as well as serf peasants from house and home, and enriching themselves with the goods of these. To this particular end, the miscarried peasant revolts of the sixteenth century furnished the best pretext. After the first attempts had succeeded, never after were reasons wanting to proceed further in equally violent style. With the aid of all manner of chicaneries, vexations and twistings of the law--whereto the in-the-meantime naturalized Roman law lent a convenient handle--the peasants were bought out at the lowest prices, or they were driven from their property in order to round up the estates of n.o.blemen. Whole villages, the peasant homes of as much as half a province, were in this way wiped out. Thus--so as to give a few ill.u.s.trations--out of 12,543 peasant homestead appanages of knightly houses, which Mecklenburg still possessed at the time of the Thirty Years" War, there were, in 1848, only 1,213 left. In Pommerania, since 1628, not less than 12,000 peasant homesteads disappeared. The change in peasant economy, that took place in the course of the seventeenth century, was a further incentive for the expropriation of the peasant homesteads, especially to turn the last rests of the commons into the property of the n.o.bility. The system of rotation of crops was introduced. It provided for a rotation in cultivation within given s.p.a.ces of time. Corn lands were periodically turned into meadows. This favored the raising of cattle, and made possible the reduction of the number of farm-hands. The crowd of beggars and tramps grew ever larger, and thus one decree followed close upon the heels of another to reduce, by the application of the severest punishments, the number of beggars and vagabonds.
In the cities matters lay no better than in the country districts.
Before then, women were active in very many trades in the capacity of working women as well as of employers. There were, for instance, female furriers in Frankfurt and in the cities of Sleswig; bakers, in the cities of the middle Rhine; embroiderers of coats of arms and beltmakers, in Cologne and Stra.s.sburg; strap-cutters, in Bremen; clothing-cutters in Frankfurt; tanners in Nuerenberg; gold spinners and beaters in Cologne.[55] Women were now crowded back. The abandonment of the pompous Roman Catholic worship alone, due to the Protestantizing of a large portion of Germany, either injured severely a number of trades, especially the artistic ones, or destroyed them altogether; and it was in just these trades that many working women were occupied. As, moreover, it ever happens when a social state of things is moving to its downfall, the wrongest methods are resorted to, and the evil is thereby aggravated. The sad economic condition of most of the German nations caused the decimated population to appear as _overpopulation_, and contributed greatly towards rendering a livelihood harder to earn, and towards prohibitions of marriage.
Not until the eighteenth century did a slow improvement of matters set in. The absolute Princes had the liveliest interest, with the view of raising the standard abroad of their rule, to increase the population of their territories. They needed this, partly in order to obtain soldiers for their wars, partly also to gain taxpayers, who were to raise the sums needed either for the army, or for the extravagant indulgences of the court, or for both. Following the example of Louis XIV of France, the majority of the then extraordinarily numerous princely courts of Germany displayed great lavishness in all manner of show and tinsel.
This was especially the case in the matter of the keeping of mistresses, which stood in inverse ratio to the size and capabilities of the realms and realmlets. The history of these courts during the eighteenth century belongs to the ugliest chapters of history. Libraries are filled with the chronicles of the scandals of that era. One potentate sought to surpa.s.s the other in hollow pretentiousness, insane lavishness and expensive military fooleries. Above all, the most incredible was achieved in the way of female excesses. It is hard to determine which of the many German courts the palm should be a.s.signed to for extravagance and for a life that vitiated public morals. To-day it was this, to-morrow that court; no German State escaped the plague. The n.o.bility aped the Princes, and the citizens in the residence cities aped the n.o.bility. If the daughter of a citizen"s family had the luck to please a gentleman high at court, perchance the Serenissimus himself, in nineteen cases out of twenty she felt highly blessed by such favor, and her family was ready to hand her over for a mistress to the n.o.bleman or the Prince. The same was the case with most of the n.o.ble families if one of their daughters found favor with the Prince. Characterlessness and shamelessness ruled over wide circles. As bad as the worst stood matters in the two German capitals, Vienna and Berlin. In the Capua of Germany, Vienna, true enough, the strict Maria Theresa reigned through a large portion of the century, but she was impotent against the doings of a rich n.o.bility, steeped in sensuous pleasures, and of the citizen circles that emulated the n.o.bility. With the Chast.i.ty Commissions that she established, and in the aid of which an extensive spy-system was organized, she partly provoked bitterness, and partly made herself laughable. The success was zero. In frivolous Vienna, sayings like these made the rounds during the second half of the eighteenth century: "You must love your neighbor like yourself, that is to say, you must love your neighbor"s wife as much as your own;" or "If the wife goes to the right, the husband may go to the left: if she takes an attendant, he takes a lady friend." In how frivolous a vein marriage and adultery were then taken, transpires from a letter of the poet Ew. Chr. von Kleist, addressed in 1751 to his friend Gleim. Among other things he there says: "You are already informed on the adventure of the Mark-Graf Heinrich. He sent his wife to his country seat and intends to divorce her because he found the Prince of Holstein in bed with her.... The Mark-Graf might have done better had he kept quiet about the affair, instead of now causing half Berlin and all the world to talk about him. Moreover, _such a natural thing should not be taken so ill_, all the more when, like the Mark-Graf, one is not so waterproof himself. Mutual repulsion, we all know, is unavoidable in married life: all husbands and wives are perforce unfaithful, due to _their illusions concerning other estimable persons. How can that be punished that one is forced to?_" On Berlin conditions, the English Amba.s.sador, Lord Malmsbury, wrote in 1772: "Total corruption of morals pervades both s.e.xes of all cla.s.ses, whereto must be added the indigence, caused, partly through the taxes imposed by the present King, partly through the love of luxury that they took from his grandfather. The men lead a life of excesses with limited means, while the women are harpies, wholly bereft of shame. They yield themselves to him who pays best. Tenderness and true love are things unknown to them."[56]
Things were at their worst in Berlin under Frederick II, who reigned from 1786 to 1796. He led with the worst example; and his court chaplain, Zoellner, even lowered himself to the point of marrying the King to the latter"s mistress, Julie von Boss, as a second wife, and as she soon thereupon died in childbed, Zoellner again consented to marry the King to the d.u.c.h.ess Sophie of Doenhoff as a second wife by the side of the Queen.
More soldiers and more taxpayers was the leading desire of the Princes.
Louis XIV, after whose death France was entirely impoverished in money and men, set up pensions for parents who had ten children, and the pension was raised when they reached twelve children. His General, the Marshal of Saxony, even made to him the proposition to _allow marriages only for the term of five years_. Fifty years later, in 1741, Frederick the Great wrote, "I look upon men as a herd of deer in the zoological garden of a great lord, their only duty is to populate and fill the park."[57]
Later, he extensively depopulated his "deer park" with his wars, and then took pains to "populate" it again with foreign immigration.
The German multiplicity of States, that was in fullest bloom in the eighteenth century, presented a piebald map of the most different social conditions and legislative codes. While in the minority of the States efforts were made to improve the economic situation by promoting new industries, by making settlement easier and by changing the marriage laws in the direction of facilitating wedlock, the majority of the States and statelets remained true to their backward views, and intensified the unfavorable conditions of marriage and settlement for both men and women. Seeing, however, that human nature will not allow itself to be suppressed, all impediments and vexations notwithstanding, concubinage sprang up in large quant.i.ty, and the number of illegitimate children was at no time as large as in these days when the "paternal regiment" of the absolute Princes reigned in "Christian simplicity."
The married woman of citizen rank lived in strict seclusion. The number of her tasks and occupations was so large that, as a conscientious housewife, she had to be at her post early and late in order to fulfil her duties, and even that was possible to her only with the aid of her daughters. Not only were there to be filled those daily household duties which to-day, too, the small middle cla.s.s housewife has to attend to, but a number of others also, which the housewife of to-day is freed from through modern development. She had to spin, weave, bleach and sew the linen and clothes, prepare soap and candles, brew beer,--in short, she was the veriest Cinderella: her only recreation was Sunday"s church.
Marriage was contracted only within the same social circles; the strongest and most ludicrous spirit of caste dominated all relations, and tolerated no transgression. The daughters were brought up in the same spirit; they were held under strict home seclusion; their mental education did not go beyond the bounds of the narrowest home relations.
On top of this, an empty and hollow formality, meant as a subst.i.tute for education and culture, turned existence, that of woman in particular, into a veritable treadmill. Thus the spirit of the Reformation degenerated into the worst pedantry, that sought to smother the natural desires of man, together with his pleasures in life under a confused ma.s.s of rules and usages that affected to be "worthy," but that benumbed the soul.
Gradually, however, an economic change took place, that first seized Western Europe and then reached into Germany also. The discovery of America, the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, the opening of the sea route of the East Indies, the further discoveries that hinged on these, and finally, the circ.u.mnavigation of the earth, revolutionized the life and views of the most advanced nations of Europe. The unthought-of rapid expansion of the world"s commerce, called to life through the opening of ever newer markets for European industry and products, revolutionized the old system of handicraft. Manufacture arose, and thence flowed large production. Germany--so long held back in her material development by her religious wars and her political disintegration, which religious differences promoted,--was finally dragged into the stream of the general progress. In several quarters, large production developed under the form of manufacture: flax and wool-spinning and weaving, the manufacture of cloth, mining, the manufacture of iron, gla.s.s and porcelain, transportation, etc. Fresh labor power, female included, came into demand. But this newly rising form of industry met with the most violent opposition on the part of the craftsmen, ossified in the guild and medieval corporation system, who furiously fought every change in the method of production, and saw therein a mortal enemy. The French Revolution supervened. While casting aside the older order in France, the Revolution also carried into Germany a fresh current of air, which the old order could not for long resist. The French invasion hastened the downfall,--this side of the Rhine also--of the old, worn-out system. Whatever attempt was made, during the period of re-action after 1815, to turn back the wheels of time, the New had grown too strong, it finally remained victorious.
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 cla.s.s, the bourgeoisie or capitalist cla.s.s--arrived the moment Germany gained her political unity. The capitalist cla.s.s 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.
The circ.u.mstance, on the one hand, that the now naturally more numerous marriages effected a rapid increase of population, and, on the other, that the gigantically developing industry of the new era brought on many ills, never known of before, caused the spectre of "overpopulation" to rise anew. Conservative and liberal economists pull since then the same string. We shall show what this fear of so-called overpopulation means; we shall trace the feared phenomenon back to its legitimate source.
Among those who suffer of the overpopulation fear, and who demand the restriction of freedom to marry, especially for workingmen, belong particularly Prof. Ad. Wagner. According to him, workingmen marry too early, in comparison with the middle cla.s.s. He, along with others of this opinion, forget that the male members of the higher cla.s.s, marry later only in order to wed "according to their station in life," a thing they can not do before they have obtained a certain position. For this abstinence, the males of the higher cla.s.ses indemnify themselves with prost.i.tution. Accordingly, it is to prost.i.tution that the working cla.s.s are referred, the moment marriage is made difficult for, or, under certain circ.u.mstances, is wholly forbidden to, them. But, then, let none wonder at the results, and let him not raise an outcry at the "decline of morality," if the women also, who have the same desires as the men, seek to satisfy in illegitimate relations the promptings of the strongest impulse of nature. Moreover, the views of Wagner are at fisticuffs with the interests of the capitalist cla.s.s, which, oddly enough, shares his views: it needs many "hands," so as to own cheap labor-power that may fit it out for compet.i.tion in the world"s market.
With such petty notions and measures, born of a near-sighted philistinism, the gigantic growing ills of the day are not to be healed.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Tarnowsky. "Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtsinnes."
Berlin, August Hirschwald.
[23] Tacitus, "Histories," Book I.
[24] Montegazza "L"Amour dans l"Humanite."
[25] Matthew, ch. 19; 11 and 12.
[26] I. Corinthians, ch. 7; 1 and 38.
[27] Peter I., ch. 3; 1.
[28] Paul: Ephesians, ch. 5; 23.
[29] Paul: I. Corinthians, ch. 11; 7.
[30] I. Timothy, ch. 2; 11 and 12.
[31] I. Corinthians, ch. 14; 34 and 35.