436 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
ranks of the great middle-class parties (the Conservatives and a portion of the National Liberals). The law governing associa- tion and assemblage, which already affronts all liberal demands — how we envy the English and the Americans when we hear of the personal liberties that obtain in their states! — this law was to be made still more restrictive in the several states of the empire, and the program was actually carried out in Saxony, although not in Prussia. In this series of assaults upon the labor movement, which were undertaken partly by the governments and partly by the above-named great parties, belongs now also the proposed law which at the present moment almost alone occupies the attention of social politics in Germany ; namely, the law for the protection of the conditions of factory labor, as it is officially termed by the imperial government ; the " House of Correction Law" [Zuchthausgesctz') , as it is called with propriety by the laborers who are most affected by it. I must speak some- what at length of this law, its antecedents, and its significance, because in this connection the present status and future prospects of social reform in Germany are most evident.
Among the great employers it had been for some time per- ceived as an unwelcome fact that during the last decade there had been a very considerable development of the labor organiza- tions in Germany. Our labor movement, to be sure, lags behind that in America and in England, but compared with the condi- tion between 1880 and 1884 it has already become a decided power. It is easy to understand that corresponding with this growth there was on the side of the employers increasing impatience and opposition toward the organizations. In many trades there was a considerable degree of harmony, to be sure, between the employers and the laborers. In the printing trades, for example, a three-years' tariff was accepted by the great printers' organizations, and this agreement covered the rates of wages and the hours of labor for all Germany. In other trades there were movements toward similar tariffs arranged in common between employers and labor organizations. But the great masses of the employers stand today still upon the old position, namely, that they will not concede to the labor organizations
