Roughly twenty years after passage of Germany's—the world's first—national system of social insurance, Henry Axel Bueck, the chief executive of its most powerful capitalist organization, the Central Association of German Industrialists, remarked that the accident, health, and pension laws of the 1880s had failed to turn the working class away from the socialist labor movement. Bueck had correctly predicted that Kaiser Wilhelm I and chancellor Otto von Bismarck were in for disappointment in thinking that the laws could “conciliate the masses.” Nevertheless, Bueck supported the legislation then and through the following two decades. Looking back, he said,

[w]ith worker insurance the German Reich has accomplished, with incomparable boldness and most tenacious endurance, a work of civilization (Kulturarbeit) of the highest order, which will for all time . . . bring it renown. The edifice erected has proved worthy of its founders, the great Kaiser and his trusted advisor, the first imperial chancellor.