THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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extremely low) the master finances his leisure. From the beginning of the ownership of a plough and a field this exploitation divided people into two kinds, two classes,
and it has become broader and stricter than ever. If progress in goodness and happiness is often dubious in historical terms, that of squeezing people dry is not; it
occurred by and large more and more aridly and blatantly. The Greek slave was looked after better than the serf, and the latter better than the modern labourer. For
the slave was at least the livestock of his master, and so he was fed and had his stable. Whereas the serf had to look after himself, in so far as he was left with any time
to do so and the owner of the village left him a bowl. In 1525 the German serf who had taken for himself the freedom of a Christian man hung on the rope. Or he
stumbled with his eyes gouged out and his tongue torn out through the Holy Roman Empire until he perished in a ditch. Even the situation of the journeymen approached
that of the peasants towards the end of the Middle Ages, to the same extent that the master turned from a patriarchal foreman into an early capitalist exploiter. In
Danzig in around 1550, striking journeymen had their ears cut off, and in Florence they were branded by the hangman and flogged out of the city. Individuality was
under way only in the higher strata, coming from the capital of merchants and princes, but at the bottom the wholesome bonds prevailed. The conqueror certainly did
not admit to all children of the earth that the highest happiness was personality; the dream of it was punishable by torture and death. Until at last even freedom of
movement began, man as the free owner of his labour. As a partner with equal rights of the contract of employment which he concludes with the capitalist; eye to eye,
tooth for tooth. The blessings, described by Engels, of the early industrial age arrived; after the slave, the serf, and the gradually swallowed­up journeyman, the
proletarian appeared. If the situation of the working class was miserable up till then, it now became hellish; the proletariat around 1800 began on the level of the galley
slave. Often even four­year­old children were forced to work, in dark mine tunnels or in the muggy stinking cotton factories, the usual age for beginning work was eight
or nine years old. Working hours for children lasted six to ten hours, from the age of thirteen to eighteen they increased to twelve hours, women and men over eighteen
stood at their machines for their profiteers from five o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock in the evening, and often longer. The women suckled their children while
they operated the machine, there were no breaks for eating, the pitiful wage mostly disappeared on rent anyway. Capital opposed any change of this hell, more
conservatively than any feudal lord ever did;