File:Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner by Ernst Sandau.jpg

Identifier: menaroundkaiserm00wilerich (find matches)
Title: Men around the Kaiser; the makers of modern Germany
Year: 1913 (1910s)
Authors: Wile, Frederic William, 1873-1941
Subjects: William II, German Emperor, 1859-1941 Germany -- Biography Germany -- Politics and government 1888-1918 Germany -- Intellectual life
Publisher: Philadelphia, Lippincott
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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of military airman-ship. To insure it enthusiastic support from oneend of the Empire to another. Count Posadowskywas asked to become the Honorary President.Within six months, subscriptions aggregating;f35o,ooo rolled in. The French were beatenalmost two to one. Count Posadowsky owes his fame and popularityto his eminent service as administrator and reformerof German Social Legislation. He was not thefather of State Insurance, in which realm it hastruly been said that Germany is a generationahead of the rest of the world, but he was the pioneerof the modern idea on which the whole great schemenow rests, viz., that State care of the sick, the injured,the disabled, and the old is not a condescension, butan obligation. It was the Posadowsky era at theGerman Imperial Ministry of the Interior whichfirst broke with the tradition that WorkmensInsurance was primarily a sop to the proletariat foranti-Socialistic purposes. It was Posadowsky who,abandoning the idea of Patriarchalism, made the264
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POSADOWSKY nation understand that State Insurance was aninstitution intrenched in justice and right. Hecaused it to be recognised as a system which formedan indissoluble part of humanitys self-liberatingprocess. It required courage and tenacity toadvocate these revolutionary views as an activemember of an aristocratic and semi-autocraticGovernment. The closing hours of the old centurywere ringing with demands for re-enforcementof Bismarcks anti-Socialist repressive laws. Germanindustry, alarmed at the increasing terrorism ofSocial Democracy, had accomplished the passage ofthe so-called Convict-Prison Law, providing penalservitude for strike-pickets who molested blacklegs.It was the time when the influence of Von Miquel,the shrewd Prussian Chancellor of the Exchequerknown as the Finance Sorcerer, was paramount.It was in such an environment that CountPosadowsky made bold to proclaim the doctrinethat the Labour movement was not merely somethingto be tolerated by a quasi-benevolent Govern

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