"It was Rudolf Steiner's destiny during the war years to be able to do a lot to help individuals, but little in the world outside, taking into account the hosts of suffering human beings. This was painful to him. A wider field of work became open when in the summer of 1917 a private initiative put him in the position to lay before leading German and Austrian statesmen his views concerning the times and their demands.

"In written Memoranda Rudolf Steiner tried to express that the real causes of the war still being waged did not lie in the aggression of single states, but in the disastrous mixing of political, economic, and spiritual-cultural spheres of interest in every single state concerned. Only through the separating out of these three spheres of life into social institutions, which in their working would bring nations together instead of keeping them apart, could further world conflicts be avoided. The governments of Germany and Austria would have to set a social reform in that sense as their 'peace aim'. In the world at large a fuller understanding towards the people of middle Europe would thereby be brought about, even in the midst of passionate upheavals. In Russia, where war-weariness was particularly strong in that chaotic period after the 1917 Revolution, such a peace-move would probably have a significant reaction. A dramatic conversation Rudolf Steiner had with Richard von Kühlmann,who had become German Minister of Foreign Affairs, led to no result. Count Polzer-Hoditz, Austrian Cabinet Minister, carefully studied the Memorandum and thought, as he says in his Memoirs, that Rudolf Steiner's proposals 'indeed came to meet the practical demands of the coming age.' But the ideas seemed to him so revolutionary that he never brought them forward, except when he had his final audience with the Emperor Karl in November 1917. Thus the impulse for a Threefold Social Order came to nothing on this occasion. A second attempt was made in Spring 1919. After the surrender in November 1918 Germany was threatened for several months by violent upheavals. There was famine in many places, and demonstrations, strikes and riots were everyday occurrences. The workmen demanded higher wages, shorter working hours, a share in the direction of affairs, etc. The universal remedy seemed to them to be nationalisation of all industries. Rudolf Steiner was also asked by industrialists to contribute to the violent discussions taking place all over the country about Germany's future. He gave the answer in April 1919 both with his book 'The Threefold Commonwealth' and also by lecturing in Switzerland and South Germany, where he and a number of other people spoke in committee-rooms, public houses and factories to industrialists and to workmen about the ideas of a Threefold Social Order. Rudolf Steiner and his collaborators tried to show that a large part of the revolutionary ferment had other and deeper causes than was generally assumed. Thus the 'inferiority complex' of workmen did not derive so much from political and economic grounds, but from cultural deprivation. Only the participation in a free, spiritual life, whose goal was to give each citizen the best chances of individual development, could satisfy this deep social longing of the proletariat. As regards the material needs of the workers, Rudolf Steiner was firmly convinced that the important position conceded to the economic life in modern times could never be balanced by state controls. The rights of the proletariat could best be safeguarded by a political system which was entirely free from the influence of economic interests. Its sole function should be to regulate the legal relations and the security of the citizen on the basis of equality. The economic life should serve, not a struggle for power, but a brotherly impulse, through the working of Consumer-Producer Associations. Especially among workers who did not belong to any Union - at that time a very large part of the German proletariat - Rudolf Steiner won much approval through the unusual faculty he had of speaking straight from the heart. But the Trade Union leaders, thinking as they did in terms of party politics, saw a danger in the ideas he presented. It was due mainly to their opposition, that the "Movement for a Threefold Social Order" had to be abandoned in its original form as early as the summer of 1919."