In no state, apparently, had the working-class developed a consciousness of a separate interest or an organization that commanded the attention of the politicians of the time. In turning over the hundreds of pages of writing s left by eighteenth-century thinkers one cannot help being impressed with the fact that the existence and special problems of a working-class, the already sufficiently numerous to form a considerable portion of society, were outside the realm of politics, except in so far a the future power of the proletariat was foreseen and feared