The workingman talked loudly, and held his head high.

Was it the result of having served in one or more campaigns?
Had he in the background of his mind a vision of dying men and desolate villages, seen so often on the battlefield?
However it was, he became violent and quarrelsome, indifferent alike to wounding and death, and learned to make use of the knife like any cutthroat townsman.
With this return to barbarism (an unfailing result with the soldier after every time of war) went a degree of animal spirits, which made one ask whether the workman had learned something of epicurean philosophy.

He had the same excited love of tattling as a thoughtless girl, and the animal love of enjoyment of a sailor after a long voyage.
His ordinary life seemed to him so uninteresting, so dull, that he tried to give color and charm to it by taking as many holidays as possible, and making his work more agreeable with gambling and drinking, and going for loafing excursions about the neighborhood.
Visits to wine and beer-houses and dancing-rooms were endlessly multiplied, and everything had the golden foundation which the proverb of an age of simplicity hardly attributed to honorable handicraft.
Profits were squandered in drink; life was a rush and a riot without end.
But curiously, in the same degree in which the opportunities of work were increased and wages became higher, life everywhere easier, and the ordinary enjoyments greater; just so did the workman grow discontented.
Desires increased with their gratification, and envy measured its own prosperity by the side of the luxury of the nouveaux riches.
The hand which never before had held so much money, now learned to clinch itself in hatred against the owner of property, the company promoter; against all in fact who were not of the proletariat.

The Social Democrat had sprung up ten years before from the circle of the intelligent political economists and philosophers of the artisan classes.

Since the war they numbered thousands and ten of thousands, and now began to grow and widen like a moorland fire, at first hardly perceptible, then betraying through the puff of smoke the fire creeping along the ground; then a thousand tongues of flame leap upward, and suddenly sooner or later the whole heath is in a blaze.