English Social Policy around the Middle of the Nineteenth Century as Seen by German Social Reformers

The acknowledgement of a timelag between Great Britain and Germany, which can be put at between thirty and forty years at the end of the eighteenth century and then shrank steadily up to the period of intensive industrialisation in the 1870s. Research so far, therefore, has concentrated almost entirely on the transfer and use of technical and economic knowledge, although a glance at the German literature of social criticism and reform during the 'Vormarz'. The 'Vormarz', when pauperism began to assume threatening proportions in Prussian Germany and the limits of the traditional means of helping the poor became evident, marks the beginning of the first phase of the learning process. To the Prussian social reformers the border between the purely charitable institutions and the militant workers' organisations seemed too fluid for imitation of the English development to seem desirable.