II.2. Part II: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question — II

If we may believe our Dr. Sax, the capitalist gentlemen have already done a great deal to relieve the housing shortage, and have furnished the proof that the housing question can be solved on the basis of the capitalist mode of production.

First of all Herr Sax cites — Bonapartist France! Louis Bonaparte, as is well known, at the time of the Paris World Exhibition appointed a commission, ostensibly to report on the condition of the working classes of France, in reality to depict this condition, to the greater glory of the Empire, as truly paradisiac. And it is to the report of this commission, composed of the most corrupt tools of Bonapartism, that Herr Sax appeals, particularly because the results of its work are “fairly complete for France, according to the committee’s own statement”! And what are these results? Of 89 big industrialists or joint-stock companies that supplied information, 31 have built no workers’ dwellings at all; the dwellings built house, by Sax’s own estimate, at most 50,000 to 60,000 people, and consist almost exclusively of only two rooms for each family!

It is self-evident that every capitalist whom the conditions of his industry — water power, the location of coal mines, iron-ore deposits and other mines, and so on — tie to a particular rural locality must build dwellings for his workers if there are none. To see in this a proof of the existence of the “latent association,” “an eloquent testimony to the growth of understanding of the matter and its great importance,” a “very promising beginning” (p. 115), requires a highly developed habit of deceiving oneself. Incidentally, the industrialists of the different countries differ in this respect too according to their national character. For instance, Herr Sax tells us on page 117: “In England an increased activity of employers in this direction has become noticeable only quite recently. It is particularly the remote hamlets in the countryside.… The circumstance that the workers would otherwise often have a long way to walk from the nearest village to the factory, and arriving there already exhausted perform insufficient work, is what chiefly gives the employers the motive for building dwellings for their workpeople. However, the number of those is also increasing who, with a deeper understanding of the situation, link housing reform more or less with all the other elements of the latent association, and it is to these that those flourishing colonies owe their origin.… The names of an Ashton in Hyde, Ashworth in Turton, Grant in Bury, Greg in Bollington, Marshall in Leeds, Strutt in Belper, Salt in Saltaire, Ackroyd in Copley and others are well known in the United Kingdom on that account.”

Holy simplicity, and holier ignorance! Only “quite recently” have the English rural factory owners built workers’ dwellings! No, dear Herr Sax, the English capitalists are real big industrialists, not only in their purses but in their heads. Long before Germany possessed a real large-scale industry, they had realised that in rural manufacture the outlay on workers’ dwellings is a necessary part of the total capital invested, and one that pays very well both directly and indirectly. Long before the struggle between Bismarck and the German bourgeois presented the German workers with the freedom of combination, the English factory owners, mine-owners and ironmasters had learned in practice what pressure they can exert on striking workers when they are at the same time the landlords of those workers. The “flourishing colonies” of a Greg, an Ashton, an Ashworth belong so much to “quite recently” that forty years ago they were already being trumpeted by the bourgeoisie as models, as I myself described twenty-eight years ago (Condition of the Working Class, pp. 228–30, note). Those of Marshall and Akroyd (that is how the man spells his name) are about as old, and that of Strutt is much older still, its beginnings reaching back into the last century. And since in England the average life of a workers’ dwelling is reckoned at forty years, Herr Sax can count on his fingers in what dilapidated state these “flourishing colonies” now are. Besides, most of these colonies are no longer in the country; the colossal expansion of industry has surrounded most of them with factories and houses to such an extent that they now lie in the middle of dirty, smoky towns of 20,000 to 30,000 and more inhabitants — which does not prevent German bourgeois science, as represented by Herr Sax, from still faithfully reciting today the old English hymns of praise of 1840, which no longer apply at all.

And now old Akroyd! This worthy man was indeed a philanthropist of the purest water. He loved his workers, and particularly his women workers, so much that his less philanthropic competitors in Yorkshire used to say of him that he ran his mills exclusively with his own children! Herr Sax does assert, it is true, that in these flourishing colonies “illegitimate births are becoming ever rarer” (p. 118). Yes indeed — illegitimate births outside marriage; for in the English factory districts the pretty girls marry very young.

In England the building of workers’ dwellings close beside every large rural factory, and at the same time as the factory, has been the rule for sixty years and more. As already mentioned, many such factory villages have become the nucleus around which a whole factory town later grew, with all the evils a factory town brings with it. These colonies, then, have not solved the housing question; they first created it in their localities.

In the countries, on the other hand, that have merely limped along behind England in the field of large-scale industry, and that really learned what large-scale industry is only after 1848 — in France and especially in Germany — it is quite different. Here it is only colossal ironworks and factories that, after long hesitation, decide to build a few workers’ dwellings — such as Schneider’s works at Le Creusot and Krupp’s at Essen. The great majority of rural industrialists let their workers trudge miles to the factory in the morning and home again in the evening, through heat, snow and rain. This is particularly the case in hilly districts — in the French and Alsatian Vosges, as on the Wupper, the Sieg, the Agger, the Lenne and other Rhenish-Westphalian rivers. In the Erzgebirge it will be no better. It is the same petty niggardliness among Germans as among Frenchmen.

Herr Sax knows very well that both the very promising beginning and the flourishing colonies mean less than nothing. He therefore now tries to prove to the capitalists what splendid returns they can draw from building workers’ dwellings. In other words, he tries to show them a new way of cheating the workers.

First he holds up to them the example of a number of London building companies, partly philanthropic, partly speculative in character, which have made a net return of 4 to 6 per cent and more. That capital invested in workers’ dwellings pays well, Herr Sax has no need to prove to us. The reason more is not invested in them than is, is that dearer dwellings pay the owner still better. Herr Sax’s admonition to the capitalists therefore again comes down to a mere moral sermon.

As for these London building companies, whose brilliant successes Herr Sax trumpets so loudly, they have, according to his own enumeration — and every kind of building speculation is included in it — provided accommodation altogether for 2,132 families and 706 single men, that is, for under 15,000 persons! And such childish trifles are seriously presented in Germany as great successes, while in the East End of London alone a million workers live in the most wretched housing conditions? All these philanthropic efforts are in fact so pitifully insignificant that they are never even mentioned in the English parliamentary reports dealing with the condition of the workers.

Of the ridiculous ignorance of London that spreads itself through this whole section we shall say nothing here. Just one thing. Herr Sax thinks the lodging-house for single men in Soho closed because in that district “a numerous clientele could not be counted on.” Herr Sax imagines the whole West End of London to be one single luxury town and does not know that right behind the most elegant streets lie the filthiest working-class quarters, of which Soho, for example, is one. The model lodging-house in Soho of which he speaks, and which I knew twenty-three years ago, at first had customers in plenty, but closed because nobody could stand living in it. And it was one of the best at that.

But the workers’ town of Mulhouse in Alsace — that is surely a success?

The workers’ town at Mulhouse is the great show-horse of the Continental bourgeois, just as the once flourishing colonies of Ashton, Ashworth, Greg and company are of the English. Unfortunately it is not the product of the “latent” association but of the open association between the Second French Empire and the Alsatian capitalists. It was one of Louis Bonaparte’s socialist experiments, for which the state advanced a third of the capital. In fourteen years (up to 1867) it built 800 small houses on a defective system, one that would be impossible in England, where they understand these things better, and hands them over to the workers as their property after thirteen to fifteen years, against monthly payment of an increased rent. This method of acquiring property, long since introduced in the English co-operative building societies, as we shall see, did not need to be invented by the Alsatian Bonapartists. The additions to the rent for the purchase of the houses are fairly heavy compared with the English ones; the worker, for example, after paying in 4,500 francs bit by bit over fifteen years, receives a house that was worth 3,300 francs fifteen years before. If the worker wants to move away, or is even a single monthly payment in arrears (in which case he can be turned out), he is charged 6⅔ per cent of the original value of the house as annual rent (for example, 17 francs a month for a house worth 3,000 francs), and the rest is paid back to him, but without a penny of interest. That the company can grow fat on this, quite apart from the “state aid,” is understandable; it is just as understandable that the dwellings provided under these circumstances, if only because they are built outside the town and half in the country, are better than the old barracks dwellings in the town itself.

Of the few miserable experiments in Germany, whose wretchedness even Herr Sax acknowledges on page 157, we shall say not a word.

What, then, do all these examples prove? Simply that the building of workers’ dwellings, even when not all the laws of hygiene are trampled underfoot, pays capitalistically. But that has never been disputed; we all knew it long ago. Every investment of capital that satisfies a need pays when it is rationally managed. The question is precisely why, in spite of this, the housing shortage persists — why, in spite of this, the capitalists do not provide sufficient healthy dwellings for the workers? And here Herr Sax again has only exhortations to address to capital, and owes us the answer. The real answer to this question we have already given above.

Capital — this has now been finally established — does not want to abolish the housing shortage even if it could. There remain only two other expedients: the self-help of the workers, and state help.

Herr Sax, an enthusiastic admirer of self-help, has wonders to relate of it in the field of the housing question too. Unfortunately he has to admit at the very start that it can achieve anything only where the cottage system either exists or is at least practicable — so again only in the country; in the big towns, even in England, only on a very limited scale. Then, sighs Herr Sax, “reform through it” (self-help) “can be accomplished only in a roundabout way, and therefore always only imperfectly, namely only in so far as the principle of ownership has a power reacting on the quality of the dwelling.” This too might be doubted; at any rate “the principle of ownership” has by no means had a reforming effect on the “quality” of our author’s style. In spite of all this, self-help in England has worked such wonders “that everything else done there to solve the housing question in other directions is far surpassed.” These are the English “building societies,” which Herr Sax treats at greater length particularly because “very inadequate or erroneous ideas of their nature and working are in general circulation. The English building societies are by no means building companies or building co-operatives; they are rather… to be described in German roughly as ‘house-purchase associations’; they are associations whose purpose is to accumulate a fund out of periodic contributions of the members and from it, in accordance with the means available, to grant the members loans for the purchase of a house. The building society is thus for one part of its members a savings bank, for the other part a loan fund. The building societies are therefore mortgage-credit institutions designed for the needs of the worker, which mainly… turn the savings of the workers… to the account of the depositors’ fellows in class for the purchase or building of a house. As is to be expected, these loans are granted against the pledge of the property in question and are so constituted that they are paid off in short instalments combining interest and amortisation.… The interest is not paid out to the depositors but always credited to them at compound interest.… The deposits, together with the accrued interest… can be withdrawn at any moment on a month’s notice” (pp. 170–72). “There are over 2,000 such associations in England… the capital accumulated in them amounts to about £15,000,000, and some 100,000 working-class families have already in this way come into possession of a hearth and home of their own; a social achievement which surely cannot soon be matched by another” (p. 174).

Unfortunately here too the “but” comes limping close behind: “A complete solution of the question is, however, by no means yet attained. If only because the acquisition of a house is open only to the better-placed workers.… Sanitary considerations in particular are often insufficiently observed” (p. 176). On the Continent “such associations… find only little scope for development.” They presuppose the cottage system, which exists here only in the country; and in the country the workers are not yet sufficiently developed for self-help. On the other hand, in the towns, where real building co-operatives could form, “very considerable and serious difficulties of many kinds stand in their way” (p. 179). They could only build cottages, and that is not possible in the big towns. In short, “under present conditions — and hardly in the near future either — this form of co-operative self-help” can “scarcely be expected to play the chief part in solving the present question.” These building co-operatives are, you see, still “in the stage of their first undeveloped beginnings.” “This applies even to England” (p. 181).

So: the capitalists will not and the workers cannot. And with that we could close this section, were it not absolutely necessary to give some enlightenment about the English building societies, which bourgeois of the Schulze-Delitzsch stamp always hold up to our workers as a model.

These building societies are neither workers’ societies, nor is their main purpose to provide workers with houses of their own. On the contrary, we shall see that this happens only very exceptionally. The building societies are essentially speculative in character, the small ones, which are the original ones, no less than their big imitators. In a public house, usually at the instigation of the landlord, at whose premises the weekly meetings are then held, a number of regular customers and their friends — shopkeepers, clerks, commercial travellers, small masters and other petty bourgeois, here and there also an engineer or some other worker belonging to the aristocracy of his class — join together to form a building society. The immediate occasion is usually that the landlord has discovered a plot of land in the neighbourhood or elsewhere that can be had comparatively cheaply. Most of the members are not tied by their occupations to any particular district; even many of the shopkeepers and craftsmen have only business premises in the town, not a dwelling; whoever can, prefers to live outside rather than in the middle of the smoky town. The building plot is bought, and as many cottages as possible are put up on it. The credit of the better-off members makes the purchase possible; the weekly contributions, together with a few small loans, cover the weekly building costs. Those members who are speculating on a house of their own are allotted the cottages as they are finished, by lot, and the corresponding addition to the rent amortises the purchase price. The remaining cottages are let or sold. The building society, however, if it does good business, accumulates a smaller or larger fortune, which belongs to the members as long as they pay their contributions and is distributed from time to time, or on the dissolution of the society. That is the life story of nine English building societies out of ten. The rest are larger societies, sometimes formed under political or philanthropic pretexts, but whose main purpose in the end is always to provide the savings of the petty bourgeoisie with a better-paying mortgage investment, with good interest and the prospect of dividends, by means of speculation in landed property.

On what sort of customer these societies speculate may be shown by the prospectus of one of the largest, if not the largest, of them. The Birkbeck Building Society, 29 and 30 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, London, whose receipts since its foundation amount to over £10½ million (70 million thalers), which has over £416,000 invested in the bank and in government securities, and which at present numbers 21,441 members and depositors, announces itself to the public as follows:

“Most people are familiar with the so-called three years’ system of the pianoforte makers, under which anyone who hires a pianoforte for three years becomes its owner at the end of that time. Before the introduction of this system it was almost as difficult for people of limited income to acquire a good pianoforte as a house of their own; one paid year in and year out for the hire of the pianoforte and spent two or three times as much money as it was worth. But what can be done with a pianoforte can also be done with a house.… Since, however, a house costs more than a pianoforte… a longer period is needed to pay off the purchase price by rent. Consequently the directors have made arrangements with house-owners in various parts of London and its suburbs which enable them to offer the members of the Birkbeck Building Society and others a large choice of houses in the most varied parts of the town. The system on which the directors propose to proceed is to let the houses for 12½ years, at the end of which period, if the rent has been regularly paid, the house becomes the absolute property of the tenant without further payment of any kind. The tenant may also contract for a shorter term at a higher rent, or a longer term at a lower rent.… People of limited income, clerks, shop assistants and others can at once make themselves independent of any landlord by becoming members of the Birkbeck Building Society.”

That is clear enough. No mention of workers, but of people of limited income, shop assistants, clerks and so on; and on top of that it is assumed that the applicants as a rule already own a pianoforte. In fact we are dealing here not with workers at all but with petty bourgeois and those who wish and are able to become such: people whose income, though within certain limits, as a rule gradually rises, like that of commercial clerks and similar occupations, whereas the worker’s income, at best remaining the same in amount, in reality falls in proportion to the growth of his family and its increasing needs. In fact only a few workers can exceptionally take part in such societies. On the one hand their income is too small, on the other too uncertain in nature, for them to undertake obligations twelve and a half years ahead. The few exceptions to whom this does not apply are either the best-paid workers or factory foremen.

Anyone can see, moreover, that the Bonapartists of the workers’ town of Mulhouse are nothing but miserable imitators of these petty-bourgeois English building societies — except that, in spite of the state aid granted them, they swindle their customers far more than the building societies do. Their terms are on the whole less liberal than those generally in force in England; and while in England interest and compound interest are always reckoned on every payment and it is paid back on a month’s notice, the Mulhouse manufacturers pocket the interest and compound interest and pay back only the amount paid in, in hard five-franc pieces. And nobody will be more surprised at this difference than Herr Sax, who has it all in his book without knowing it.

So the workers’ self-help, too, comes to nothing. There remains state help. What can Herr Sax offer us in this respect? Three things. “First, the state has to see to it that it eliminates or suitably improves in its legislation and administration everything that in any way results in increasing the housing shortage of the working classes” (p. 187). That is: revision of building legislation and freedom of the building trades, so that building may be cheaper. But in England building legislation is reduced to a minimum, the building trades are as free as the birds of the air, and yet the housing shortage exists. Moreover, building in England is now so cheap that the houses shake when a cart passes, and some collapse every day. Only yesterday, 25 October 1872, six of them collapsed at once in Manchester and seriously injured six workers. So that is no help either.

“Second, the state power has to prevent the individual, in his limited individualism, from propagating the evil or calling it forth anew.”

That is: sanitary and building-police inspection of workers’ dwellings, and the transfer to the authorities of the power to close dwellings that are dangerous to health or structurally unsafe, as has been done in England since 1857. But how was it done there? The first act, of 1855 (Nuisances Removal Act), remained, as Herr Sax himself admits, “a dead letter,” and so did the second, of 1858 (Local Government Act) (p. 197). On the other hand Herr Sax believes that the third, the Artisans’ Dwellings Act, which applies only to towns of over 10,000 inhabitants, “certainly bears favourable witness to the high understanding of the British Parliament in social matters” (p. 199) — whereas this assertion once again only “bears favourable witness to” Herr Sax’s total unfamiliarity with English “matters.” That England is in general far ahead of the Continent “in social matters” goes without saying; it is the mother country of modern large-scale industry, in it the capitalist mode of production has developed most freely and furthest, its consequences appear here most glaringly, and therefore here too they first call forth a reaction in legislation. The best proof of this is the factory legislation. But if Herr Sax believes that an act of Parliament need only acquire the force of law to be immediately put into practice, he is greatly mistaken. And this applies to no act of Parliament more (with the possible exception of the Workshops Act) than precisely to the Local Government Act. The carrying out of the law was entrusted to the town authorities, which almost everywhere in England are acknowledged centres of corruption of every kind, of nepotism and jobbery. The agents of these town authorities, who owe their posts to all sorts of family considerations, are either unable or unwilling to carry out such social laws, whereas precisely in England the state officials entrusted with preparing and carrying out social legislation are mostly distinguished by strict performance of their duty — though less so now than twenty or thirty years ago. In the town councils the owners of unhealthy and dilapidated dwellings are almost everywhere strongly represented, directly or indirectly. The election of town councillors by small wards makes those elected dependent on the pettiest local interests and influences; no town councillor who wants to be re-elected dares vote for the application of this act to his ward. It is understandable, then, with what reluctance this act was received by the local authorities almost everywhere, and that so far it has been applied only to the most scandalous cases — and even then mostly only as a result of an epidemic that had already broken out, as last year in Manchester and Salford during the smallpox epidemic. Appeal to the Home Secretary has so far been effective only in cases of this kind, for it is the principle of every liberal government in England to propose social reform laws only under compulsion and, if at all possible, not to carry out those already in existence. The act in question, like many others in England, has significance only in that in the hands of a government dominated or pressed by the workers, which finally really applies it, it will be a powerful weapon for making a breach in the present state of society.

“Third,” according to Herr Sax, the state power is to “bring into use on the most comprehensive scale all the positive measures at its disposal for relieving the existing housing shortage.”

That is, it is to build barracks, “truly model buildings,” for its “subordinate officials and servants” (but these are not workers!) and “grant loans… to municipal bodies, companies and also private persons for the purpose of improving the dwellings of the working classes” (p. 203), as is done in England under the Public Works Loan Act and as Louis Bonaparte did in Paris and Mulhouse. But the Public Works Loan Act too exists only on paper; the government puts at most £50,000 at the disposal of the commissioners, that is, the means for building at most 400 cottages, so that in forty years 16,000 cottages, or dwellings for at most 80,000 people — a drop in the ocean! Even if we assume that after twenty years the commission’s means are doubled by repayments, so that in the last twenty years dwellings for a further 40,000 people are built, it is still only a drop in the ocean. And since the cottages last on average only forty years, after forty years the available £50,000 or £100,000 must be used each year to replace the oldest cottages as they fall into decay. This is what Herr Sax, on page 203, calls carrying out the principle correctly in practice and “on an unlimited scale too”! And with this admission that the state, even in England, has achieved next to nothing “on an unlimited scale,” Herr Sax closes his book, only “launching” one more moral sermon at all concerned.

That the present-day state can neither remedy the housing plague nor wants to is as clear as daylight. The state is nothing but the organised collective power of the possessing classes, the landowners and capitalists, against the exploited classes, the peasants and workers. What the individual capitalists (and they alone are in question here, since in this matter the landowner concerned also appears first in his capacity as capitalist) do not want, their state does not want either. If, then, the individual capitalists deplore the housing shortage but can hardly be moved even to gloss over its most frightful consequences superficially, the collective capitalist, the state, will not do much more either. At most it will see to it that the degree of superficial glossing-over that has once become customary is carried out everywhere uniformly. And we have seen that this is the case.

But, it may be objected, in Germany the bourgeois do not yet rule; in Germany the state is still a power hovering to a certain extent independently above society, which for that very reason represents the collective interests of society and not those of a single class. Such a state can certainly do much that a bourgeois state cannot; from it one may expect quite different things in the social field too.

That is the language of reactionaries. In reality the state as it exists in Germany too is the necessary product of the social basis out of which it has grown. In Prussia — and Prussia is now decisive — there exists, beside a still powerful landowning nobility, a comparatively young and above all very cowardly bourgeoisie, which so far has won neither direct political rule, as in France, nor the more or less indirect kind, as in England. Beside these two classes, however, there exists a rapidly growing proletariat, intellectually highly developed and becoming more organised every day. We find here, therefore, beside the basic condition of the old absolute monarchy — the balance between the landed nobility and the bourgeoisie — the basic condition of modern Bonapartism — the balance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In both the old absolute and the modern Bonapartist monarchy, however, the real power of government lies in the hands of a special caste of officers and officials, which in Prussia is recruited partly from its own ranks, partly from the minor entailed nobility, more rarely from the great nobility, and least of all from the bourgeoisie. The independence of this caste, which seems to stand outside and, so to speak, above society, gives the state the appearance of independence of society.

The form of state that has developed with necessary consistency in Prussia (and, following its example, in the new constitution of the German Empire) out of these contradictory social conditions is sham constitutionalism — a form that is both the present-day form of dissolution of the old absolute monarchy and the form of existence of the Bonapartist monarchy. In Prussia, from 1848 to 1866, sham constitutionalism merely covered and mediated the slow decay of the absolute monarchy. Since 1866, however, and especially since 1870, the upheaval of social conditions, and with it the dissolution of the old state, has been proceeding before everyone’s eyes and on a colossally increasing scale. The rapid development of industry, and especially of stock-exchange swindling, has dragged all the ruling classes into the whirlpool of speculation. The large-scale corruption imported from France in 1870 is developing with unheard-of speed. Strousberg and Pereire take off their hats to each other. Ministers, generals, princes and counts deal in shares in competition with the most cunning stock-exchange Jews, and the state recognises their equality by making barons of the stock-exchange Jews wholesale. The landed nobility, long industrial as manufacturers of beet sugar and distillers of brandy, has long since left the old solid times behind and swells with its names the lists of directors of all joint-stock companies, sound and unsound. The bureaucracy increasingly scorns embezzlement as the only means of improving its salaries; it leaves the state to fend for itself and hunts for the far more lucrative posts in the management of industrial enterprises; those who remain in office follow the example of their superiors, speculate in shares, or get themselves “a share” in railways and so on. One is even justified in assuming that the lieutenants too have their little hands in many a speculation. In short, the decomposition of all the elements of the old state, the transition of the absolute monarchy into the Bonapartist one, is in full swing, and with the next great commercial and industrial crisis not only the present swindle will collapse but the old Prussian state as well.

And this state, whose non-bourgeois elements are becoming more bourgeois every day, is to solve “the social question,” or even only the housing question? On the contrary. In all economic questions the Prussian state is falling more and more under the sway of the bourgeoisie; and if legislation since 1866 has not been adapted in the economic field to the interests of the bourgeoisie even more than it has, whose fault is that? Mainly that of the bourgeoisie itself, which, first, is too cowardly to press its demands energetically, and second, resists every concession as soon as that concession at the same time puts new weapons in the hands of the threatening proletariat. And if the state power, that is, Bismarck, tries to organise a bodyguard proletariat of its own in order to keep the political activity of the bourgeoisie in check, what is that but a necessary and well-known little Bonapartist device, which commits it to nothing towards the workers but a few benevolent phrases and at most a minimum of state aid for building societies à la Louis Bonaparte?

The best proof of what the workers have to expect from the Prussian state lies in the use made of the French milliards, which have given the independence of the Prussian state machine from society a new, short reprieve. Has even a single thaler of these milliards been used to put a roof over the heads of the Berlin working-class families thrown on to the streets? On the contrary. When autumn came, the state itself had the few wretched huts that had served them as emergency shelter in the summer pulled down. The five milliards are going the way of all flesh quickly enough — into fortresses, cannon and soldiers; and in spite of Wagner von Dummerwitz, in spite of Stieber conferences with Austria, the German workers will not get even as much of the milliards as Louis Bonaparte gave the French workers out of the millions he had stolen from France.