For old age merely, he cannot begin to draw his full pension until he has attained the ripe age of seventy-one years.

Then he will draw the full amount.

He may anticipate that if he be incapacitated; but in that case the pension will be on a lower scale, proportioned to the amounts paid in and the length of time of the payments.
The details of the measure are so complex as to cause a good deal of friction and discontent.

The calculation of the various payments alone employs an army of clerks: the need of safeguarding against personation and other kinds of fraud makes a great number of precautions necessary; and thus the whole system becomes tied up with red tape in a way that even the more patient workman of the Continent cannot endure.
In a large measure, then, the German Government has failed in its efforts to cure the industrial classes of their socialistic ideas.

But its determination to attach them to the new German Empire, and to make that Empire the leading industrial State of the Continent, has had a complete triumph.