When Bazaine, at three o'clock, received word that the Germans were extending the line to enclose his right wing, he ordered Picard's Division of the Grenadier Guards, posted at Plappeville, to advance to the scene of action. Though the distance was no more than a mile through the wooded valley on the right of the highway, his all-important reinforcement had not yet arrived at seven o'clock, and Marshal Canrobert, who was hardly able, by the most strenuous efforts, to check the advance of the Prussians, decided to rally his troops closer to the fortified town of St.-Privat. The retreat from Roncourt was to be covered by a small rearguard, as the border of the Bois de Jaumont was to be held.

Thus it happened that the Saxons found less resistance at Roncourt than they expected, and entered the town after a short struggle, together with the companies of the extreme left of the Guards; part of them had previously been diverted from the road to Roncourt to assist the Guards, and marched direct on St.-Privat. There terrible havoc was worked by the twenty-four batteries of the two German Corps. Many houses were in flames, or falling in ruins under the shower of shell. But the French were determined to defend this point, where the fate of the day was to be decided, to the last. The batteries belonging to their right wing were placed between St.-Privat and the Bois de Jaumont, that is, on the flank of the advancing Saxons. Others faced the Prussians from the south, and as the German columns came on side by side they were received by a shower of bullets from the French rifles.



All these obstacles were defied in the onward rush, though again under heavy losses, some stopping here and there to fire a volley, others again never firing a shot. By sundown they stood within 300 paces of St.-Privat. Some detachments of the Xth Corps, who were on the road to St.-Ail, now joined them, and the final onset was made from every side at once. The French still defended the burning houses and the church with great obstinacy, till, finding themselves completely surrounded, they surrendered at about eight o'clock. More than 2,000 men were taken prisoners, and the wounded were rescued from the burning houses.

The defeated remnant of the IVth French Corps retired towards the valley of the Moselle, their retreat being covered by the brigade occupying the Bois de Jaumont and by the cavalry.

Only at that period did the Grenadier Guards put in an appearance, drawing up the artillery reserves east of Amanvillers. The German batteries at once took up the fight, which lasted till late in the night, and Amanvillers also was left burning.

Here the retirement of the IVth French Corps had already commenced, screened by repeated severe onslaughts; the right wing of the Guards and the left of the IXth Corps had a lively hand-to-hand encounter with the enemy. Still the town remained in the hands of the French for the night. Their IIId Corps maintained their position at Moscow until three o'clock, and the IId until five o'clock in the morning, though engaged in constant frays with the outposts of the Pomeranian Division, who eventually took possession of the plateaus of Moscow and Point-du-Jour.

This success of the 18th of August had only been made possible by the preceding battles of the 14th and 16th.

The French estimate their losses at 13,000 men. In October, 173,000 were still in Metz, which proves that more than 180,000 French engaged in the battle of the 18th. The seven German Corps facing them were exactly 178,818 strong. Thus the French had been driven out of a position of almost unrivalled natural advantages by a numerically inferior force. It is self-evident that the loss of the aggressors must have been much greater than that of the defence; it amounted to 20,584 men, among them 899 officers.

Though the war-establishment provides one officer to every forty men, in this battle one officer had been killed to every twenty-three; a splendid testimony to the example set by the officers to their brave men, but a loss which could not be made good during the course of the war. During the first fortnight of August, in six battles the Germans had lost 50,000 men. It was impossible at once to find substitutes, but new companies were formed of time-expired soldiers.

The first thing to be done that same evening was to move on the foremost baggage train, and the ambulance corps from the right bank of the Moselle; ammunition was also served out all round. In Rezonville, which was crowded with the wounded, a little garret for the King and quarters for the Staff had with much difficulty been secured. The officers were engaged throughout the night in studying the requirements which the new situation created by the victory peremptorily demanded. All these orders were placed before His Majesty for approval by the morning of the 19th.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 45: From The Franco-German War of 1870-71. Permission Harper & Brothers, New York and London.]



CONSOLATORY THOUGHTS ON THE EARTHLY LIFE AND A FUTURE EXISTENCE (1890)[46]

TRANSLATED BY MARY HERMS

PREFACE

The last noteworthy use to which the aged Fieldmarshal put his pen was to commit to paper certain reflections and chains of reasoning, for which he drew upon the rich experience of his strenuous and eventful life, and in which he hoped to find consolation in his last days, and a vantage ground from which he might cast a glance over the unknown future and confirm his faith in an everlasting life.

The aim of the Fieldmarshal, in writing these pages, was to attain to clearness of vision concerning his earthly lot, to bring the forces which were at work in his soul into harmony with those which govern the universe, to reconcile faith and knowledge, and to satisfy himself that life on this earth can only be regarded as a preparation for eternal life, and must be regulated accordingly. So lofty is this aim that it alone entitles these confessions to a serious and respectful consideration. But how much must our admiration and our sense of the value of this work be increased when we perceive with what earnestness of effort, and with what depth of feeling, the Fieldmarshal had revolved these thoughts in his mind till he brought them to maturity. And more than that. It was his wish to bequeath these consolatory thoughts to his family, as a sincere confession of his private convictions. This is the light in which he wished posterity to regard this manuscript, which he wrote out in the last year of his life, in wonderfully firm characters, which attest the worth of the matter contained in it.

He wrote down these thoughts at Creisau, and left the copy on his desk. Whenever he visited his country-seat he revised and corrected what he had written. No less than four drafts of the introduction to this work have been preserved.

The succession of thoughts is the same in all four versions, but on the one hand renewed and deepened meditations enabled him to express his ideas with greater force and precision, and on the other sometimes developed them further, so as to present them more exhaustively and convincingly.

These pages contain the last efforts of a noble life. In them Moltke appears as he was when we knew him and took him for our pattern, reconciled with the anomalies and the contradictions of life, with a pious grasp of principles which he had thought out for himself, and in the assurance of which he found peace. We learn here how it was possible for him to rise superior to the world, and preserve a contented mind in all the vicissitudes of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 46: From Moltke: His Life and Character. Permission Harper & Brothers, New York and London.]



DR. TORCHE-MITTLER.

Man feels that he is a complete being, different from other creatures, and outwardly distinguished from them by his body, which here on earth is the habitation of the soul.

Yet in this complete whole I believe I can distinguish different functions, which, though closely connected with the soul, and ruled by it, have an independent existence.

In the mysterious beginnings of life physical development takes the first place. Nature is busily at work in the child's body as it grows, and is already preparing it to be the dwelling-place of higher functions. The body reaches the acme of its perfection before its career is half over, and out of the surplus of its energy calls new life into being. Thenceforward its lot is decay and painful struggling to preserve its own existence.

During something like a third of our existence, that is, while we are asleep, the body receives no commands from its ruler, and yet the heart beats without interruption, the tissues are wasted and repaired, and the process of respiration is continued, all independently of our will.

The servant may even rebel against the master, as when our muscles are painfully contracted by cramp. But pain is the summons for help which is sent by the living organism when it has lost control over the dead matter, which loss we feel as the illness of our vassal.

On the whole we must regard our body as a real part of our being, which is still, in a sense, external to our inmost selves.

Is, then, the soul at least the true ego, a single and indivisible whole?

The intellect advances, by slow development, to greater and greater perfection till old age is reached, if the body does not leave it in the lurch. The critical faculty grows as experience accumulates, but memory, reason's handmaid, disappears at an earlier stage, or at least loses the power of receiving new impressions. Wonderful enough is this faculty which enables us to store up all the valuable lessons and experiences of earliest youth in a thousand drawers, which open in a moment in answer to the requirements of the mind.

It is not to be disputed that the old often appear dull-witted, but I cannot believe in a real darkening of the reason, which is a bright spark of the Divine, and even in madness the negation of reason is only external and apparent. A deaf man playing on an instrument out of tune may strike the right notes, and be inwardly persuaded that his execution is faultless, while all around him hear nothing but the wildest discords.

The sovereignty of reason is absolute; she recognizes no superior authority. No power, not even that of our own wills, can compel her to regard as false what she has already recognized as true.

E pur si muove!

Thought ranges through the infinite realms of starry space, and fathoms the inscrutable depths of the minutest life, finding nowhere any limit, but everywhere law, which is the immediate expression of the divine thought.

The stone falls on Sirius by the same law of gravitation as on the earth; the distances of the planets, the combinations of chemical elements are based on arithmetical ratios, and everywhere the same causes produce the same effects. Nowhere in nature is there anything arbitrary, but everywhere law. True, reason cannot comprehend the origin of things, but neither is she anywhere in conflict with the laws that govern all things. Reason and the universe are in harmony; they must therefore have the same origin.

Even when, through the imperfection of all created things, reason enters on paths which lead to error, truth is still the one object of her search.

Reason may thus be brought into conflict with many an honored tradition. She rejects miracle, "faith's dearest child," and refuses to admit that Omnipotence can ever find it necessary for the attainment of its purposes to suspend, in isolated cases, the operation of those laws by which the universe is eternally governed. But these doubts are not directed against religion, but against the form in which religion is presented to us.

Christianity has raised the world from barbarism to civilization. Its influence has, in the course of centuries, abolished slavery, ennobled work, emancipated women, and revealed eternity. But was it dogma that brought these blessings? It is possible to avoid misunderstandings with regard to all subjects except those which transcend human conception, and these are the very subjects over which men have fought and desolated the world for the last eighteen hundred years, from the extermination of the Arians, on through the Thirty Years' War, to the scaffold of the Inquisition, and what is the result of all this fighting? The same differences of opinion as ever.

We may accept the doctrines of religion, as we accept the assurance of a trusty friend, without examination, but the kernel of all religions is the morality they teach, of which the Christian is the purest and most far-reaching.

And yet men speak slightingly of a barren morality, and place the form in which religion is presented before everything else. I fear it is the pulpit zealot, who tries to persuade where he cannot convince, that empties the church with his sermons.

After all, why should not every pious prayer, whether addressed to Buddha, to Allah, or to Jehovah, be heard by the same God, beside whom there is none other? Does not the mother hear her child's petition in whatever language it lisps her name?

Reason is nowhere in conflict with morality, for the good is always finally identical with the rational; but whether our actions shall or shall not correspond with the good, reason cannot decide. Here the ruling part of the soul is supreme, the soul which feels, acts, and wills. To her alone, not to her two vassals, has God entrusted the two-edged sword of freewill, that gift which, as Scripture tells us, may be our salvation or our perdition.

But, more than this, a trusty councillor has been assigned us, who is independent of our wills, and bears credentials from God Himself. Conscience is an incorruptible and infallible judge, whom, if we will, we may hear pronounce sentence every moment, and whose voice at last reaches even those who most obstinately refuse to listen.

The laws which human society has imposed upon itself can take account of actions only in their tribunals, and not of thoughts and feelings. Even the various religions make different demands among the different peoples. Here they require the Sunday to be kept holy, here the Saturday or Friday. One allows pleasures which another forbids. Even apart from these differences there is always a wide neutral ground between what is allowed and what is forbidden; and it is here that conscience, with her subtler discrimination, raises her voice. She tells us that every day should be kept sacred to the Lord, that even permitted interest becomes unjust when exacted from the needy; in a word, she preaches morality in the bosom of Christian and Jew, of heathen and savage. For even among uncivilized races which have not the light of Christianity there is an agreement as to the fundamental conceptions of good and evil. They, too, recognize the breaking of promises, lying, treachery, and ingratitude as evil; they, too, hold as sacred the bond between parents, children, and kinsmen. It is hard to believe in the universal corruption of mankind, for, however obscured by savagery and superstition, there lies dormant in every human breast that feeling for the noble and the beautiful which is the seed of virtue, and a conscience which points out the right path. Can there be a more convincing proof of God's existence than this universal sense of right and wrong, this unanimous recognition of one law, alike in the physical and in the moral world, except that nature obeys this law with a full and absolute obedience, while man, who is free, has the power of violating it?

The body and the reason serve the ruling part of the soul, but they put forward claims of their own, they have their own share of power, and thus man's life is a perpetual conflict with self. If in this conflict the soul, hard-pressed from within and without, does not always end by obeying the voice of conscience, let us hope that He who created us imperfect will not require perfection from us.

For consider to what violent storms man is exposed in the voyage of life, what variety there is in his natural endowments, what incongruity between education and position in life. It is easy for the favorite of fortune to keep in the right path; temptation, at any rate to crime, hardly reaches him; how hard, on the other hand, is it for the hungry, the uneducated, the passionate man to refrain from evil. To all this due weight will be given in the last judgment, when guilt and innocence are put in the balance, and thus mercy will become justice, two conceptions which generally exclude one another.

It is harder to think of nothing than of something; when the something is once given, harder to imagine cessation than continuance. This earthly life cannot possibly be an end in itself. We did not ask for it; it was given to us, imposed upon us. We must be destined to something higher than a perpetual repetition of the sad experiences of this life. Shall those enigmas which surround us on all sides, and for a solution of which the best of mankind have sought their whole life long, never be made plain? What purpose is served by the thousand ties of love and friendship which bind past and present together, if there is no future, if death ends all?

But what can we take with us into the future?

The functions of our earthly garment, the body, have ceased; the matter composing it, which even during life was ever being changed, has entered into new chemical combinations, and the earth enters into possession of all that is her due. Not an atom is lost. Scripture promises us the resurrection of a glorified body, and indeed a separate existence without limitation in space is unthinkable; yet it may be that this promise implies nothing more than the continued existence of the individual, as opposed to pantheism.

We may be allowed to hope that our reason, and with it all the knowledge that we have painfully acquired, will pass with us into eternity; perhaps, too, the remembrance of our earthly life. Whether that is really to be wished is another question. How if our whole life all our thoughts and actions should some day be spread out before us and we became our own judges, incorruptible and pitiless?

But, above all, the emotions must be retained by the soul, if it is to be immortal. Friendship does indeed rest on reciprocity, and is partly an affair of the reason; but love can exist though unreturned. Love is the purest, the most divine spark of our being.

Scripture bids us before all things love God, an invisible, incomprehensible Being, who sends us joy and happiness, but also privation and pain. How else can we love Him than by obeying His commandments, and loving our fellow-men, whom we see and understand?

When, as the Apostle Paul writes, faith is lost in knowledge, and hope in sight, and only love remains, then we hope, not without reason, to be assured of the love of our merciful Judge. COUNT MOLTKE.

Creisau, October, 1890.

* * * * *



THE LIFE AND WORK OF FERDINAND LASSALLE

By ARTHUR N. HOLCOMBE, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University

Ferdinand Lassalle was born on April 11, 1825, at Breslau, of Jewish parents. The father, Hyman Lassal, was a prosperous business man, ambitious for his son, able to give him the best education the times afforded, and willing to let him choose his own career. The life of the Lassal family seems to have been like that of any well-to-do Jewish family in the kingdom of Prussia during the early nineteenth century. Of a quiet and peaceable behavior, they were devoted mainly to money-making and their domestic affairs.

The young Lassalle gave early indications of his unusual character. While still a boy in the local grammar school, his proud and independent disposition won him the displeasure of his teachers. Especially the oppression of his own race filled his soul with wrath. "O could I only give myself up to my boyish day-dreams," he wrote in his note-book at this time, "how I would put myself at the head of the Jews, weapons in hand, and make them independent!" Eventually he abandoned in disgust the attempt to gain a classical education in the schools of his native city and entered the commercial high school in Leipzig. Here again his fiery temperament could not brook the restraints imposed upon him and he presently returned to his father's house.

The problem of a career was not easy to solve. The father's success enabled the son to choose his course in life without regard to financial considerations. Business and mere money-making were in fact distasteful to him.



The learned professions were more to his liking. The father recommended medicine or the law, but the son aspired to some less hackneyed career. Jews were not then admitted to the service of the state in Prussia and the absence of popular institutions of government rendered an independent political career for the time being out of the question. The son chose, therefore, to make his mark as a man of learning. He would be a great philosopher or scientist. Doubtless he kept in mind the possibility of engaging in journalism, should the times change, and becoming a tribune of the people. Such bold ideas are the birthright of all boys of spirit.

Ferdinand Lassale finished his education with his destiny consciously before him. He studied philology and philosophy at the universities of Breslau and Berlin and in the winter of 1845-46 made his first visit to Paris as a traveling scholar. Here he first adorned his family name with the final le, and here, also, he met the chief of the heroes of his youth, Heinrich Heine. Heine has given us a vivid pen-picture of Lassalle, as he saw him in those student days. "My friend, Mr. Lassalle ... is a most highly gifted young man, uniting the widest knowledge with the greatest astuteness. I have been astounded at his energy of will, vigor of intellect, and promptness of action.... Lassalle is a true child of modern times, wishing to know nothing of the humility and renunciation which have characterized our own lives. This new race means to enjoy, to assert itself.... We were, however, perhaps happier in our idealism than these stern gladiators who go forth so proudly to mortal combats."

Returning to Berlin in the spring of 1846, Lassalle signalized the attainment of his majority by espousing the cause of the Countess von Hatzfeld, then in the midst of her suits for divorce and for an accounting of her property. It was a characteristic act. The Countess' troubles arose through no fault of his. He had little to gain by engaging in the affair and much to lose—not only time and money, but friends, reputation, and his very career. Yet he plunged into the thick of the fray and made the cause of the unhappy lady his own. For eight long years he fought her enemies from law-court to law-court, through thirty-six of them in all, to final victory. From it all he gained a good working knowledge of the law, a splendid training in forensic address, and a taste of the joys of combat against bitter odds. These things were later to stand him in good stead. But he had touched smut and was himself besmirched.

Meanwhile the famous year, 1848, had come and gone. Men like Lassalle are made for just such years. His friends all played their parts, each in his own way, in the struggle for German liberty and union. Lassalle alone was absent from the field. He was defending himself against a charge of criminal conspiracy to commit larceny, an incident in the case of the Countess von Hatzfeld. He disposed of this charge in season to join the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and in the spring of 1849 he completed his apprenticeship as a revolutionist with a term in jail. At the expiration of his sentence he returned to the cause of the Countess, but he was required by the Prussian government to keep away from Berlin. Not until 1857, through the intervention of A. von Humboldt, did he receive permission to resume his residence in the capital. Then, with his friend, the Countess, he settled down once more to the realization of his youthful dreams, and the long-deferred career was taken up in earnest.

Lassalle's career as a scholar and man of learning was short, but productive. It was opened in 1857 with the publication of his work, the Philosophy of Heraclitus, projected more than ten years before, and it was concluded in 1861, as the event proved, by the publication of his System of the Acquired Rights. Midway between the two appeared a dramatic composition, Franz von Sickingen, which served both as an intellectual diversion from the more serious studies in philosophy and law and as a personal confession of faith on the part of the author. None of these works can be pronounced an unqualified success. The philosophy of Heraclitus was too obscure to exert any great influence upon contemporary thought, even when expounded by a Lassalle, and the philosophy of Lassalle himself was too closely modeled upon that of his master, Hegel, to obtain much notice on its own account. The treatise on the acquired rights of man was too technical to attract popular attention and too unorthodox to receive the general approval of professional students of the law. The Franz von Sickingen was too deficient in dramatic action to be presented on the stage and too artificial in literary form to be read in the library. The three productions secured for Lassalle a position among scholars but brought him no general recognition.

The three productions, however, pour a flood of light upon Lassalle's own powerful personality. In the Philosophy of Heraclitus he grappled with the most formidable philosophical problems and showed himself a master of the Hegelian dialectic. In the System of the Acquired Rights he attacked the very foundations of the current theories of law and justice with the same concentration of energy and purpose as had been displayed in the more practical problems of law and justice involved in the case of the Countess von Hatzfeld. But it is in Franz von Sickingen that Lassalle expressed his own nature most clearly and most completely. Here indeed he speaks directly for himself through the lips of Ulrich von Hutten. Passage after passage springs from the soul of the living Lassalle, the same Lassalle that in his boyhood dreams would emancipate the Jews by force of arms, that in his early manhood so deeply impressed Heine, and that so shortly afterwards was ready to defy all the powers of the kingdom in defence of a friendless woman. The following speech of the legendary von Hutten is characteristic of the real Lassalle:

"O worthy Sir! Think better of the sword! A sword, when swung in freedom's sacred cause, Becomes the Holy Word, of which you preach, The God, incarnate in reality. * * * * * And all great things, which e'er will come to pass Will owe their final being to the sword."

In short, Lassalle was not by nature a man of the study. He was a man of the battlefield.

The hour for battle was fast approaching. In 1859 the alliance of Napoleon the Third and Cavour against the Austrians was consummated and the war for the liberation and unification of Italy began. The hopes of all true Germans for the unification of the Fatherland took new life. Especially the survivors of '48 felt their pulses quicken. In 1859 Lassalle revealed his own interest in contemporary politics by the publication of his pamphlet on The Italian War and the Duty of Prussia, and in the following year by his address on Fichte's Political Legacy and Our Own Times. He also planned to establish a popular newspaper in Berlin, but the scheme was abandoned in 1861, on account of the refusal of the Prussian government to sanction the naturalization of the man whom Lassalle desired for his associate in the enterprise, Karl Marx. With the Prince of Prussia's accession to the throne and the brilliant successes of the Progressive party in the Prussian elections, men instinctively felt that the times were big with portentous events.

Lassalle's political ideas were already well developed. He was born a democrat. In early nineteenth-century England the young Disraeli could hopefully plan a different course, but Lassalle in Prussia could look for no public career as an aristocrat. Under the circumstances to be a democrat meant also to be a republican, and, if need be, a revolutionist. As a youth he drank deep from the idealistic springs that inspired the republican party throughout Germany. He admired Schiller and Fichte and, above all, Heine and Boerne. Lassalle indeed had drunk deeper than most of the revolutionists of '48. He was not only a democrat and a republican; he was also a socialist. Even before his first visit to Paris he had become acquainted with the writings of St. Simon, Fourier, and the utopian socialists in general. His mind was ripe for the doctrines of the Communist Manifesto, when that epoch-making document appeared, but he does not seem to have become personally acquainted with Marx until his connection with the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the fall of 1848. From that time on till the foundation of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein Lassalle stood closer to Marx than to any other one man.

Lassalle's opportunity to turn definitely from scholarship to politics came in 1862 with the outbreak of the struggle over the Prussian constitution. In a series of vigorous addresses (April, 1862, to February, 1863) he first criticised, then condemned, the Progressive party for its—as it seemed to him—pusillanimous policy. But Lassalle was not content merely to criticise and condemn. His restless energy found no adequate expression short of the creation of a new party of his own. His repudiation of the Progressives, however, was not dictated by differences over tactics alone. He rejected the fundamental principles of the liberal movement in German politics. He saw around him the evidences of deep and widespread poverty. The great problem of the day to his mind was not the political problem of a proper constitution of government, but the social problem of a proper distribution of wealth. The need, as he saw it, was not for parchment-guarantees of individual liberty. It was for practical promotion of social welfare. Hence, at the same time that he opened fire upon the tactics of the Progressives, he unfolded his plans for the constructive treatment of the social, as distinct from the political, problem.

The nature of Lassalle's social ideal and the character of the means by which he sought to justify it are for the first time systematically set forth in his address (April 12, 1862) "upon the special connection between modern times and the idea of a laboring class," subsequently published under the title, The Workingmen's Programme. This address was the point of departure for the socialist movement in Germany, as the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels was that of international socialism. It was indeed largely inspired by the spirit of that revolutionary document. During the two and a half years which followed the publication of this address, Lassalle often set forth his fundamental social philosophy with extraordinary clearness and force, but he never surpassed his opening salutation to the workingmen of Germany. It has been read by hundreds of thousands. It was his masterpiece.

The Workingmen's Programme attracted the immediate attention of the Prussian government. The police took offence at the tone of the address and brought against its author a charge of criminal incitement of the poor to hatred and contempt of the rich. On January 16, 1863, Lassalle appeared in court and defended himself against this charge in an almost equally celebrated address, published under the title, Science and the Workingmen. Here Lassalle speaks in a different but no less brilliant vein. From that time forth Lassalle's appearances before audiences of workingmen quite generally led to corresponding appearances before audiences of judges. If one court set him free, he was liable to be haled before another court for defamation of the prosecuting attorney in the court of first resort. But the prisoner's dock served as well as the orator's platform for the purposes of his agitation.

The Workingmen's Programme attracted less immediate attention from the workingmen themselves. But among the few whose attention was attracted was a group of Leipzig labor leaders who invited Lassalle to advise them more fully concerning his plans for the formation of an independent labor party. Lassalle's reply to this invitation was the Open Letter to the Committee for the Calling of a General Convention of German Workingmen at Leipzig, dated March 1, 1863. This letter sets forth the platform upon which Lassalle proposed to make his appeal for the support of the working classes. The two main planks of the platform were the demands for manhood suffrage and for the establishment of cooeperative factories and workshops with the aid of subventions from the State. Through manhood suffrage Lassalle expected that the working classes would immediately become the dominant power in the State, and through State-aided producers' associations he expected that the cooeperative commonwealth would eventually come into being. Manhood suffrage was thus the fundamental political condition of Social Democracy. State-aided producers' associations were but a temporary economic expedient. Upon this basis, May 23, 1863, the General Association of German Workingmen (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein) was founded.

The immediate results of the foundation of the General Association of German Workingmen were much less than Lassalle had anticipated. He had hoped that it would quickly surpass the Liberal National Association, founded by the leaders of the Progressive party in 1859, which at this time counted about 25,000 members. In fact, during Lassalle's life the Workingmen's Association never reached one-fifth of that number. The workingmen generally were slow to recognize either the character of Lassalle's purposes or the character of the man himself. Despite the power and brilliancy of the speech-making campaign upon which Lassalle promptly entered he made little headway. The progress of the movement among the rank and file, however, was more satisfactory than in any other quarter. Marx had been lost to the movement before it was inaugurated and the rigid Marxians among the German socialists continued to hold aloof. Lassalle's close personal friend, Lothar Bucher, could see no prospect of early success and withdrew while there was still time. The independent socialist, Rodbertus, to whom Lassalle next turned for assistance, had little faith in manhood suffrage and none at all in State-aided producers' associations. To confirm his unbelief in manhood suffrage he pointed to the ease with which a popular plebiscite could be manipulated by a Louis Napoleon. State-aided producers' associations, he declared to be incompatible with scientific socialism, a dangerous compromise between the national workshops advocated by the utopian socialist, Louis Blanc, and the cooeperative corporations, advocated by the anarchist, Prudhomme. So Lassalle found himself alone at the head of his new independent labor party.

It was not the workingmen but the middle-class Progressive party that was most aroused by Lassalle's Open Letter. He was regarded as a traitor to the cause of the constitution and a practical ally of the forces of reaction—in short, as either a fool or a knave. Lassalle saw clearly enough that he could not succeed without making clear to his prospective followers the irreconcilability of liberalism and socialism, and directed his most powerful efforts against the position of the Progressive party. His Workingmen's Reader (May, 1863) and Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch (January, 1864) are conspicuous memorials of his campaign against liberalism. The liberal position was substantially that the workingmen, though without effective voting-power, were honorary members of the Progressive party, and hence needed no independent party of their own, and that, for the rest, they could best promote their special economic interests by "self-help," that is, through voluntary and unassisted cooeperation. Liberal leaders, especially Schulze-Delitzsch, labored strenuously to improve the well-being of the working-classes along these lines, and their efforts were not in vain. The Progressive watchword, "right makes might," sophistical as it seemed to Lassalle, appealed to the idealism of the German people, and the party was in the heyday of its success. More and more Lassalle found himself forced by the necessities of his struggle with the Progressives into compromising relations with the government of Bismarck. His last great speech delivered at Ronsdorf on the first anniversary of the foundation of the Workingmen's Association betrays the dilemma into which he had fallen. Under the conditions of the time there was not enough room between the contending forces of progress and reaction for the great independent labor party which Lassalle had hoped to create. There was room for a humble beginning, but that was all.

It is not necessary to dwell on the details of Lassalle's last twelve months and tragic end. The story is brief: a year of exhausting toil and small result, then a short vacation, an unfortunate love-affair, a foolish challenge to a duel, a single pistol-shot, and three days later, August 31, 1864, the end. Thus he died, and on his tomb in Breslau was written: "Here lies what was mortal of Ferdinand Lassalle, the Thinker and Fighter."

The name of Lassalle is most frequently connected with that of Marx. Certainly the two had much in common. They worked together in 1848 and would have done so again in 1862 if Lassalle had had his way. For fourteen years they were personal friends. Though they ultimately drifted apart, they never became enemies. Lassalle was seven years younger than Marx and was unquestionably strongly influenced by the ideas of the founder of scientific socialism. At the same time he was a man who did his own thinking, and his speeches and writings, even those dealing most particularly with the philosophy of socialism, are by no means mere paraphrases of Marx. His ideas betray resemblances to those of various contemporary writers on socialism and the socialist movement, notably Lorenz von Stein, the author of the History of the Social Movements in France from 1789. The economic interpretation of history, set forth in the Workingmen's Programme, however, is in many respects but an amplification of the economic interpretation of history originally and more briefly set forth in the Communist Manifesto. The theory of economics in general and of wages in particular, contained in the Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, is substantially the same as that contained in Marx's Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859. Regarded solely as a theoretical socialist, Lassalle is rightly classed among the Marxians.

Yet Lassalle's position with regard to some important theoretical questions was distasteful to Marx. In philosophy, for example, Lassalle was a pure Hegelian and never abandoned the idealistic standpoint of his master. Marx, as is well known, was a materialistic Hegelian. The differences between them in this regard were revealed most clearly in the System of the Acquired Rights. Lassalle traced the development of the German laws of inheritance from the Roman concept of the immortality of the legal personality. Marx would have derived them from the conditions of life among the Germans themselves. In Franz von Sickingen and his cause Lassalle thought he saw a glimpse of the revolutionary spirit of modern times. Marx saw only a belated and futile struggle on the part of a member of the decadent medieval order of petty barons against the rising order of territorial princes. Had Lassalle linked up the cause of the petty barons with the revolt of the peasants, Marx would have thought better of his performance, but this Lassalle had neglected to do. In the Philosophy of Heraclitus Marx took little interest.

The most important differences between Marx and Lassalle arose with respect to the exigencies of practical politics. Marx, like Lassalle, was a democrat. Lassalle, however, consistently placed the demand for manhood suffrage in the forefront of his immediate political demands, whilst Marx believed that manhood suffrage under the then-existing conditions on the Continent of Europe would prove more useful to those who controlled the electoral machinery than to the workingmen themselves. Marx, like Lassalle, believed in the republican form of government. Lassalle, however, could recognize the temporary value of monarchical institutions in the struggle against the capitalistic system, whilst Marx would have had the workingmen depend upon themselves alone. Marx, like Lassalle, believed in the inevitableness of the fall of capitalism. Lassalle, however, could appreciate the desirability of realizing some portion of the promised future in the immediate present, whilst Marx preferred not to risk the prolongation of the life of the capitalistic system by attempting to discount the day when the wage-earning classes should come wholly into their own. Marx, like Lassalle, was a revolutionist. Lassalle, however, was interested primarily in bringing about the social revolution on German soil, whilst Marx was an internationalist, a veritable man without a country.

The two were bound to clash as soon as Lassalle began the development of his practical political programme. Marx was not only sceptical of the wisdom of Lassalle's campaign for manhood suffrage, but he was even strongly opposed to the campaign for the establishment of producers' associations with the aid of subventions from the Prussian monarchy. That programme represented all that was odious to Marx: organization of the wage-earners on purely national instead of international lines, conversion of private ownership of capital into corporate instead of public ownership, establishment of a social monarchy instead of a cooeperative commonwealth. Obviously Marx could not endorse Lassalle's proposals to make the socialist movement a factor in contemporary German politics, nor did Lassalle endorse the Marxian policy presently embodied in the "International."

In the matter of programme and tactics neither Marx nor Lassalle has been altogether justified by the verdict of history. In the beginning the followers of Lassalle and the followers of Marx pursued their common ends by independent roads. Brought together by the logic of events, they composed their differences, taking what seemed best to serve their purpose from the ideas of each. It is known that Marx was harshly critical of the programme adopted at Gotha in 1875. It may be guessed that Lassalle, had he lived, would not altogether have approved of the tactics pursued by those in charge of the united party's affairs. Today, the Social Democratic party, having grown strong and great, can recognize its obligations to both Marx and Lassalle.

Lassalle and Marx had entirely different functions to perform in the socialist movement. Marx's part was to be the prophet of socialism, not a prophet in the vulgar sense of a mere prognosticator, but in the old Hebrew sense of an inspired voice crying in a wilderness of unbelief. Lassalle was no prophet. His function was to reduce principles to action, to engage the forces of the times in the spirit of the times, and by combat with such weapons as lay to hand to urge the cause forward. The word "agitator" might have been invented for him. He was the first great warrior of socialism. It is no reflection upon Marx to indicate that the present need of the Social Democracy is for warriors rather than for prophets.

Lassalle was one of the great figures of modern German history. Bismarck's judgment of men was of the keenest and his opinion of Lassalle, expressed in a speech before the Reichstag (September 16, 1878) is well known: "In private life Lassalle possessed an extraordinary attraction for me, being one of the most brilliant and most agreeable men I have ever met, and ambitious in the biggest sense of the term." The eminent classical historian, Boeckh, who knew Lassalle well, compared him to Alcibiades. Heine, in a letter introducing Lassalle to a friend, wrote: "I present to you a new Mirabeau." There is much that is striking in either of these parallels.

Thoughts of what might have been, had Lassalle's career in politics not been brought to so melancholy an end, are likely to be idle. Helen von Racowitza, the pathetic instrument of his fate, not unnaturally indulged her fancy in such thoughts. Writing in her old age she queries: "Would he, ... with his incomparable ambition and will, ever have been able to adapt himself to the compact edifice of the German empire? Assuredly it must always have seemed to him like a prison!" To a woman wracked by remorse it may have been comforting to believe that when the catastrophe occurred the work of the man she once had loved was really completed. Doubtless indeed Lassalle himself had begun to realize, short as was the period from the foundation of the Workingmen's Association to the fatal duel with the Rumanian Yanko, that he could not bring his enterprise to a head as quickly as he had hoped. Doubtless he already saw that the establishment of an independent labor party was not a matter of a single hard-fought campaign, to be waged and won by the genius of any one great leader, but a task requiring long and patient toil and the indefinite postponement of the sweet joys of victory. Certainly in his last months Lassalle showed an unwise readiness seriously to compromise his position for the sake of more immediate success. Had he lived, he would soon have discovered that he must retrace those latest steps, or Bismarck, and not he, would have been the actual leader of the first German independent labor party. There was nothing in Lassalle's life to warrant the assumption that he would deliberately sell his party for a mess of pottage. Lassalle had put his hand to the plow and it was not in his nature to leave the furrow unturned.

Yet Lassalle's title to greatness must lie less in what he himself achieved than in the achievements of others in his name. He founded a political party; others have made that party great. But the most signal service is the service of the founder, for to found a party is to generate a living organism which will, in the fullness of time, express the purposes and unite the energies of millions. So it has been with the party of Lassalle. Like the husbandman who casts his seed on good ground, he implanted the germs of the Social-Democracy in the hearts of his country's workingmen when the time was ripe for the sowing. It is enough to secure his fame that he had the vision to see that the time was ripe and the strength to break the ground.

* * * * *



FERDINAND LASSALLE



THE WORKINGMEN'S PROGRAMME (1862)

TRANSLATED BY E.H. BABBITT, A.B.

Assistant Professor of German, Tufts College

Gentlemen: Requested to deliver an address before you, I have thought it best to choose, and to treat in a strictly scientific way, a subject, which, from its nature, must be particularly interesting to you, namely, the special relation of the character of the historical period in which we are living to the idea of a working class.

I have said that my treatment of the subject will be purely scientific.

A true scientific attitude, however, is nothing more than perfect clearness, and therefore the complete separation of our thinking from any preconceived notion. For the sake of this complete absence of preconceived notions with which we must approach the subject, it will even be necessary, in the course of the discussion, to form a clear conception of what we really mean by the term "workingmen" or "working class." For even on this point we must not admit any preconceived notion, as if these terms were something perfectly well understood—which is by no means the case. The language of common life very frequently attaches at different times different conceptions to the words "workingman" or "working class," and we must therefore, in due time, get a clear conception as to what meaning we will attach to these designations.

With this problem, however, we are not concerned at the present moment. We must rather begin this presentation with a different question: The working class is only one class among several which together form the body politic, and there have been workingmen at every historical period. How, then, is it possible, and what does the statement mean, that a particular connection exists between the idea of this special definite class and the principle of the particular historical period in which we are living?

To understand this it is desirable to take a glance into history—into the past, which properly interpreted, here, as everywhere, gives us the key to the present and points out to us an outline of the future. In this retrospect we must be as brief as possible, or we shall be in danger (in the short time which is before us) of not reaching at all the essential subject of the discussion. But even at this risk we shall at least be obliged to cast such a glance into the past, even if it is limited to the most general considerations, in order to understand the import of our question and of our subject.

If, then, we go back to the Middle Ages, we shall find, in general, that the same classes and divisions of the population which today compose the body politic were already in existence, although by no means so fully developed; but we find, furthermore, that at that time one class, one element, is predominate—the landholding element. It is land proprietorship which in the Middle Ages is the controlling influence in every particular, which has put its own special stamp upon all the institutions and upon the whole life of the time: it must be pronounced the ruling principle of that period.

The reason why land ownership is the ruling principle of that time is a very simple one. It lies—at least this reason is quite sufficient for our present purposes—in the economic conditions of the Middle Ages and in the state of development of production. Commerce was then very slightly developed, manufactures still less. The chief wealth of every community consisted, in greatest measure, in the products of agriculture.

Personal property at that time, in comparison with the ownership of real estate, came only slightly into consideration; how far this was the case is shown very plainly by property law, which always gives a very clear criterion for the economic relations of the period in which it arises. Medieval property law, for instance, with the object of holding the property of families from generation to generation and protecting it from dissipation, declared family property or "estate" inalienable without the consent of the heirs; but by this family property or "estate" was expressly understood only real estate. Personal or portable property, on the other hand, could be disposed of without the consent of the heirs; and in general all personal property was treated by the old German law not as an independent self-perpetuating basis of property (capital), but always as the fruit of the soil—in the same way, for instance, as the annual crop from the soil—and was subject to the same legal conditions as the latter. Nothing but real estate was then regularly treated as an independent self-perpetuating basis of property. It is therefore entirely in keeping with this condition of things, and a simple consequence of it, that landed property and those who had it in their hands almost exclusively—the nobility and clergy—formed the ruling factor, from every point of view, in the society of that period.

Whatever institution of the Middle Ages you may consider, you meet this phenomenon at every point. It will suffice us to glance at a few of the most essential of these institutions in which landholding appears as a ruling principle.

First: The organization of the public power given by it, or the Feudal System. The essential point of this was that kings, princes and lords ceded to other lords and knights land for their use, in return for which the recipient had to promise military vassalage—that is, he had to support the feudal lord in his wards or feuds, both in person and with retainers.

Second: The organization of public law, or the constitution of the empire. In the German parliaments the princes and the large landholdings of the counts, the empire, and of the clergy were represented. The cities had the right to a seat or a vote only if they had succeeded in acquiring the privileges of an imperial free city.

Third: The exemption from taxation of the large landholdings. It is a characteristic and constantly recurring phenomenon that every ruling privileged class tries constantly to throw the burden of the maintenance of the State, in open or disguised manner, in direct or indirect form, on the propertyless classes. When Richelieu, in 1641, demanded six million francs from the clergy as an extraordinary revenue, the latter gave, through the archbishop of Sens, the characteristic answer: "L'usage ancien de l'eglise pendant sa vigeur etait que le peuple contribuait ses biens, la noblesse son sang, le clerge ses prieres aux necessites de l'Etat." (The ancient custom of the church in her prosperity was that the people contributed to the needs of the State their property, the nobility their blood, the clergy their prayers.)

Fourth: The social stigma that rested upon all work other than occupation of the soil. To conduct manufacturing enterprises, to acquire money by commerce and manual trades, was considered disgraceful and dishonorable for the two privileged ruling classes, the nobility and the clergy, for whom it was regarded as honorable to obtain their revenue from landownership only.

These four great and determining motives which established the basic character of the period are entirely sufficient, for our purpose, to show how it was that landed property put its stamp upon that epoch and formed its ruling principle.

This was so far the case that even the movement of the Peasant War, which apparently was completely revolutionary—the one which broke out in Germany in 1524 and involved all Swabia, Franconia, Alsace, Westphalia, and other parts of Germany—depended absolutely upon this same principle, and was therefore in fact a reactionary movement in spite of its revolutionary attitude. The peasants at that time burned down the castles of the nobles, killed the nobles themselves, and made them run the gauntlet according to the custom of the times; but, nevertheless, in spite of this externally revolutionary appearance, the movement was essentially thoroughly reactionary. For the new birth of State relations—the German freedom which the peasants desired to establish—was to consist, according to their ideas, in the abolition of the special and intermediary position which the princes occupied between the emperor and the empire, and, in its stead, the representation in the German parliament of nothing but free and independent landed property, including that of the peasants and knights (these two classes up to this time not having been represented), as well as the individual independent estates of the nobles of every degree—knights, counts, and princes, without regard to former differences; and, on the other hand, of the landed property of the nobles as well as of the peasants.

It is clear at once, then, that this plan, in the last instance, results in nothing more than still more logical, clear, and equitable carrying-out of the principle which had formed the basis of the historical period which was even then approaching its end; that is, landownership was to be the ruling element and the only condition which entitled anybody to participation in the government of the State: that anybody should demand such participation just because he was a man, because he was a reasonable being, even without owning any land—this did not occur to the peasants in the remotest degree! For this the conditions of the time were not sufficiently developed, the method of thought of the time was not revolutionary enough.

So then this peasant uprising, which came forward externally with such revolutionary determination, was in its essence completely reactionary; that is to say, instead of standing upon a new revolutionary principle, it stood unconsciously on the old, existing principle of the period which was then just closing; and just because it was reactionary, while it thought itself revolutionary, did the peasant uprising fail.

Accordingly, in comparison with the uprising of the peasants as well as that of the nobles under Franz von Sickingen—both of which had the principle in common of basing participation in the government, more definitely than had before been the case, upon landholding—the rising monarchical idea was relatively a justifiable and revolutionary factor, since it was based upon the idea of a state sovereignty independent of landholding, representing the national idea independent of private property relations; and it was just this which gave it the power for a victorious development and for the suppression of the uprising of the peasants and the nobles.

I have gone into this point somewhat explicitly, in the first place to show the reasonableness and the progress of liberty in the development of history, even by an example in which this is not at all evident on superficial observation; in the second place, because historians are still far from recognizing this reactionary character of the peasant uprising and the reason for its failure, which lay chiefly in this aspect; but, rather deceived by external appearances, they have considered the Peasant War a truly revolutionary movement.

Finally, in the third place, because at all ages this phenomenon is frequently repeated—that men who do not think clearly (among whom are often found those apparently most highly educated, even professors) have fallen into the tremendous mistake of taking for a new revolutionary principle what is only a more logical and clear expression of the thought of a period and of institutions which are just passing away.

Gentlemen, let me warn you against such men, who are revolutionists only in their own imaginations, and such tendencies, because we shall have them in the future as we have had them in the past. We can also derive consolation from the fact that the numerous movements which, after momentary success, have immediately, or in a short time, come to naught again, which we find in history and which may cloud the superficial vision of many a patriot with gloomy forebodings, have never been revolutionary movements except in imagination. A true revolutionary movement, one which rests upon a really new idea, as the more thoughtful man can prove from history to his consolation, has never yet failed, at least not permanently.

I return to my main subject. If the Peasant Wars are revolutionary only in imagination, what was really and truly revolutionary at that time was the advance in manufacturing—the production of the middle class, the constantly developing division of labor, and the resulting wealth in capital, which accumulated exclusively in the hands of the middle class because it was just this class that devoted itself to production and reaped its profits.

It is usual to date the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern history from the Reformation—accordingly, from the year 1517. This is correct in the sense that, in the two centuries immediately following the Reformation, a slow, gradual, and unnoticed change took place, which completely transformed the aspect of society and accomplished within it a revolution that later, in 1789, was merely proclaimed, not actually produced, by the French Revolution.

Do you ask in what this transformation consisted?

In the legal position of the nobility there had been no change. Legally the nobility and the clergy had remained the two ruling classes, and the middle class the class universally kept down and oppressed. But although there had legally been no change, yet actually the reversal of conditions had been all the more tremendous.

By the production and accumulation of capital and of personal property, in contrast to real estate, in the hands of the middle class, the nobility had dwindled into complete insignificance—even into actual dependence upon the enriched middle class. If the nobles wished to maintain their place beside the middle class, they must renounce all class traditions and begin to adopt the same methods of industrial acquisition to which the middle class owed their wealth and in consequence their de facto power. The comedies of Moliere, who lived at the time of Louis XIV., show us, as an extremely interesting phenomenon, the nobles of the times despising the rich middle class and at the same time playing the parasite at its tables. Louis XIV. himself, this proudest of monarchs, takes off his hat in his palace at Versailles and humbles himself before the Jew, Samuel Bernard, the Rothschild of the times, in order to influence him in favor of a loan.

When Law, the famous Scotch financier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, formed in France his trading companies—a stock corporation which was formed for the exploitation of the Mississippi region, the East Indies, etc., the Regent of France himself was on its directorate—a member of a merchant company! The Regent found himself in fact compelled in August, 1717, to issue edicts in virtue of which the nobles might, without loss of dignity, enter into the naval and military service of these trading companies! To that point, then, the warlike and proud feudal aristocracy of France had fallen—to be the armed employees of the industrial and commercial enterprises of the middle class, whose relations extended through all continents.

Corresponding to this radical change, there had already developed a materialism and an eager, grasping struggle for money and property which could overcome all moral ideas and (what I regret to say was generally still more significant for the privileged classes) even all privileges of rank. Under this same Regent of France, Count Horn, one of the highest of the aristocracy and connected with the first families of France, even with the Regent himself, was broken on the wheel as a common robber and murderer; and the Duchess of Orleans, a German princess, writes in a letter of November 29, 1719, that six ladies of the highest rank waylaid in the court of a building the above-mentioned Law, who was at that time the most courted and the busiest man in France and therefore very hard to interview, in order to induce him to dispose of some of the shares founded by him, for which at that time all France was competing and which brought on the Exchange six and eight times the nominal price at which Law had issued them.

If you ask me again what the causes were which made possible this development of manufacturing and the consequent wealth of the middle class, I should have to exceed, if I tried to give them thorough treatment, the time at my disposal. I can only enumerate for you the most essential ones: The discovery of America and its tremendous influence on production; the route to the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope, taking the place of the former land route by way of Suez for all trade with the East Indies; the discovery of the magnetic needle and the invention of the mariner's compass, and in consequence greater safety and speed and lower insurance rates for all ocean traffic; the waterways established in the interior of the countries, the canals, also the good roads which made possible for the first time a more remote market through the lessening of the transportation costs of various commodities which formerly could not carry the raise in price thus caused; greater security of property; well-established courts of law; the invention of powder, and, in consequence of this invention, the breaking down by the monarchy of the feudal military power of the nobility; the dismissal of the mercenaries and mounted retainers of the nobles on account of the destruction of their castles and of their independent military power. For these retainers there was now nothing left but to find work in the medieval workshops. All these events gave impetus to the triumphal chariot of the middle class. All these events, and many more which might be enumerated, combined to produce this one effect. By the opening of wider markets and the accompanying reduction of the costs of production and transportation, there comes production for the world-market, and consequently the necessity for cheap production which, in its turn, can be met only by a constantly extending division of labor, i.e., by the more perfectly developed division of the work into its simplest mechanical processes; this in turn brings about a constantly increasing output.

We are on the ground here of action and reaction. Each of these circumstances is a cause for the other, and the latter then reacts upon the former, and extends it and increases its scope.

It must be clear that the production of an article in enormous quantities—its production for the world-market—is, in general, possible only if the costs of production of the article are low and if also its transportation is cheap enough not to raise its price essentially. Production in enormous quantities demands a wholesale market, and a wholesale market for any commodity can be obtained only by its low price, which makes it available for a very large number of consumers; thus the low cost of production and transportation of any commodity brings about its production on a huge scale in enormous quantities. It must also be clear, on the other hand, that the production of a commodity in enormous quantities causes and increases its cheapness. A manufacturer, for instance, who turns out 200,000 pieces of cotton goods in a year, is able, because he procures his raw material more cheaply on a large scale and because the profit on his capital and the interest on his plant is distributed over so large a number of pieces, to market each piece, within certain limits, at a far lower price than the manufacturer who produces yearly only 5,000 such pieces. Greater cheapness of production leads accordingly to production on a large scale. This results, in turn, in greater cheapness; this in its own turn brings about production in still greater quantities, and this still greater cheapness, and so on.

The relations are also quite similar in the matter of division of labor, which is another necessary condition for production in large quantities and for cheapness, for without it neither cheapness of production nor large quantities would be possible.

The division of labor which splits up the production of an article into a great number of very simple and often purely mechanical operations requiring no thought on the part of the operative, and sets at each one of these single operations a single workman, would be entirely impossible without extensive production of this article. It is therefore established and extended only through such production. On the other hand, this division of the work into simple operations leads (1), to a constantly increasing cheapness; (2), to production in enormous and constantly increasing quantities—a production calculated not only for this or that neighboring market, but for the entire world-market; and (3), through this and through new divisions which can for this reason be applied to single operations, to still farther advances in the division of labor itself.

By this series of actions and reactions there had accordingly appeared a complete transformation in the manufacturing institutions of the community and hence in all its relations of life. The best way to state this briefly is to reduce it to the following contrast:

In the early Middle Ages, since only a small number of very valuable products could stand the expense of transportation, production was calculated for the need of the immediate locality and a very limited neighboring market whose demand was, just for this reason, a well-known, steady, and unchanging one. The need or the demand preceded production and formed a well-known criterion for it; in other words, the production of the community had been chiefly artisan production. Now, in distinction from factory or wholesale production, the character of small or artisan production is this: Either the need is awaited before production—as, for example, a tailor waits for my order before he makes me a coat, a locksmith before he makes me a lock; or even if some goods are manufactured to be sold ready-made, on the whole this ready-made business is limited to a minimum of what is definitely known from experience to be the needs of the immediate locality and its nearest neighborhood—as, for instance, a tinsmith makes up a certain number of lamps, knowing that the local demand will soon dispose of them.

The characteristics of a community producing chiefly in this manner are poverty, or at least only a moderate prosperity, but, to offset this, a certain definiteness and steadiness of all relations.

Now, on the other hand, through the incessant and complete action and reaction which I have been describing to you, there had appeared in the community a totally different kind of work, and therefore of all relations of life. There had already appeared the germ of the same characteristic which today marks, in a differently developed but enormously extended manner, the production of the community. In the tremendous development which it has today this characteristic, in contrast to that previously described, can be indicated as follows: Whereas, formerly, need preceded production, made it a consequence of itself, determined it, and formed a criterion and well-known standard for it—production and supply now go in advance of the demand and try to develop it. Production is no longer for the locality, no longer for the well-known need of neighboring markets, but for the world-market. Production goes on for remote regions and for a general market, for all continents, for an actually unknown and not definitely calculated need; and in order that the product may arouse need a weapon is supplied it—cheapness. Cheapness is the weapon of a product, with which, on the one hand, it obtains customers, and, on the other, drives from the field other goods of the same nature, which are likewise urged upon the consumers; so that under the system of free competition any producer may hope, no matter what enormous quantities he may produce, to find a market for them all if he only succeeds, by making his goods exceedingly cheap, in keeping out of the market the goods of his competitors. The predominant character of such a society is vast and boundless wealth, but, on the other hand, a great instability of all relations, an almost continual, anxious insecurity in the position of each individual, together with a very unequal sharing of the returns of production among those taking part in it.

Thus great had been the changes brought about, unnoticed in the heart of society, by the revolutionary and all-pervading activity of industrialism, even before the end of the eighteenth century.

Though the men of the Peasant Wars had not ventured any other conception than that of founding the State upon land ownership, though they had not, even in thought, been able to free themselves from the view that land ownership is necessarily the element which holds sovereignty over the State and that participation in that ownership is the condition for participation in that sovereignty, yet the quiet, imperceptible, revolutionary progress of industrialism had brought about the condition that, long before the end of the eighteenth century, land ownership had become an element stripped entirely of its former importance, and had fallen to a subordinate position, in the face of the development of new methods of production, of the wealth which this development bore in its bosom and increased from day to day, and of the influence which it clearly had on all the people and their affairs—even upon the largely impoverished nobility.

The revolution was therefore an accomplished fact in the actual relations of society long before it broke out in France; and it was only necessary to bring this reversal of conditions to outward recognition to give it legal sanction. This is always the case in all revolutions. You can never make a revolution. You can only give external legal recognition and logical embodiment in practice to a revolution which has already become an actuality in the essential relations of society. Trying to make a revolution is the folly of immature men who have no conception of the laws of history.

Precisely for this reason it is just as immature and childish to suppress a revolution already fully formed in the womb of society and to oppose its legal recognition, or to reproach those who assist at its birth with being revolutionary. If the revolution is at hand in the actual conditions of society, nothing can prevent its appearing and passing into legislation.

How these things were related, and how far they had already gone in this direction in the period of which I speak, you will best see from another matter which I will mention.

I have already spoken about the division of labor, the development of which consists of separating all production into a series of entirely simple mechanical operations requiring no thought on the part of the operator. As this separation progresses farther and farther, the discovery is finally made that these single operations, because they are quite simple and call for no thought, can be accomplished just as well, and even better, by unthinking agents; and so in 1775, fourteen years before the French Revolution, Arkwright invented the first machine, his famous spinning-jenny.

We can see that the machine in itself was not the cause of the revolution. Too little time intervened between this invention, which furthermore was not immediately introduced into France, and the revolution; but it embodied in itself the actually incipient and fully ripe revolution. This machine, however innocent it seemed, was in fact the revolution personified. The reasons for this are simple. You, of course, have heard of the guild system, by which production in the Middle Ages was directed. The guild system of the Middle Ages was inseparably connected with other institutions. The guilds lasted through the whole medieval period up to the French Revolution; but as early as 1672 the matter of their abolition was considered in the German parliament, though without result. Even in 1614, in the French Etats Generaux, the abolition of the guilds was demanded by the middle class, whose production the guilds everywhere restricted; but also without result. Indeed thirteen years before the Revolution, in 1776, a minister of the Reformed party in France, the famous Turgot, abolished the guilds, but the privileged world of medieval feudalism considered itself, and with perfect justice, in mortal danger if its vital principle of privilege did not extend to all classes of society; and so, six months after the abolition of the guilds, the king was empowered to revoke this edict and to reestablish the guilds. Nothing but the Revolution could overthrow (and it did overthrow in one day, by the capture of the Bastille) that which in Germany had been vainly assailed since 1672 and in France since 1614—for almost two centuries—by legal means.

You see from this, Gentlemen, that however great the advantages of reformation by legal means are, such means have nevertheless in all the more important points one great disadvantage—that of being absolutely powerless for whole centuries; and, furthermore, that the revolutionary means, undeniable as its disadvantages are, has as a compensation the advantage of attaining quickly and effectively a practical result.

If you will now keep in mind that the guilds were connected in an inseparable manner with the whole social arrangement of the Middle Ages, you will see at once how the first machine, Arkwright's spinning-jenny, embodied a complete revolution in those social conditions.

For how could machine production be possible under the guild system, in which the number of journeymen and apprentices a master workman could employ was determined by law in each locality; or how, under the guild system, in which the different trades were distinguished by law from one another in the most exact manner, and each master could carry on only one of them—so that, for instance, the tailors and the nail-makers of Paris for centuries had lawsuits with the menders of clothes and the locksmiths, in order to draw lines between their respective trades—how, under such a guild system, could production be possible with a system of machines which requires the union of the most varied departments of work under the control of one and the same management?

It had come to the point, then, that production itself had called into being, by its constant and gradual development, instruments of production which must necessarily destroy the existing condition of things—instruments and methods of production which, under the guild system, could no longer find place and opportunity for development.

Thus considered, I call the first machine in itself a revolution; for it bore in its wheels and cogs, little as this could be seen on external observation, the germ of the new condition of things, based upon free competition, which must necessarily develop from this germ with the power and irresistibility of life itself.

And so, if I am not greatly mistaken, it may be true today that there exist various phenomena which imply a new condition that must inevitably develop from them—phenomena which, at this time also, cannot be understood from external conditions; so that the authorities themselves, while persecuting insignificant agitators, not only overlook these phenomena, but even let them stand as necessary accompaniments of our civilization, hail them as the climax of prosperity, and, on occasion, make appreciative and approving speeches in their honor.

After all these discussions you will now understand the true meaning of the famous pamphlet published by Abbe Sieyes in 1788—and so before the French Revolution—which was summed up in these words: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que le tiers etat? rien! qu' est qu'il doit etre? Tout!" Tiers etat, or third class, is what the middle class in France was called, because they formed, in contrast to the two privileged classes, the nobility and the clergy, a third class, which meant all the people without privilege. This pamphlet brings together the two questions raised by Sieyes, and their answers: "What is the third class? Nothing! What ought it to be? Everything." This is how Sieyes formulates these two questions and answers. But from all that has been said, the true meaning of these questions and answers would be more clearly and correctly expressed as follows: "What is the third class de facto—in reality? Everything! But what is it de jure—legally? Nothing!"

What was to be done, then, was to bring the legal position of the third class into harmony with its actual meaning; to clothe its importance, already existing in fact, with legal sanction and recognition; and just this is the achievement and significance of the victorious revolution which broke out in France in 1789 and exerted its transforming influence on the other countries of Europe.

This question arises here: What was this third class, or bourgeoisie, that through the French Revolution obtained victory over the privileged classes and gained control of the State? Since this third class stood in contrast to the privileged classes of society with legal vested rights, it considered itself at that time as equivalent to the whole people, and its cause as the cause of all humanity. This explains the exalting and mighty enthusiasm which was general in that period. The rights of man were proclaimed; and it seemed as if, with the liberation and sovereignty of this third class, all legal privileges in society were ended, and as if every legally privileged distinction had been replaced by its principle of the universal liberty of man.

At that time, however, in the very beginning of the movement, in April, 1789, on the occasion of the elections to a parliament which was summoned by the king under the condition that the third class should this time send as many representatives as the nobility and clergy together, a newspaper of a character anything but revolutionary writes as follows: "Who can tell us whether a despotism of the bourgeoisie will not follow the so-called aristocracy of the nobles?"

But such cries at that time were drowned in the general enthusiasm.

Nevertheless we must come back to that question, we must put the question definitely: Was the cause of the third class really the cause of all humanity; or did this third class, the bourgeoisie, bear within it a fourth class, from which it wished to distinguish itself clearly, and subject it to its sovereignty?

I must now, if I do not wish to run the risk of subjecting my presentation to great misunderstandings, explain my own conception of the word bourgeoisie, or upper bourgeoisie, as a term for a political party. The word bourgeoisie may be translated into German by Buergertum (body of citizens). In my opinion this is not what it means. We are all Buerger (citizens)—the working man, the Kleinbuerger (lower middle class), Grossbuerger (upper middle class), etc. But in the course of history the word bourgeoisie has acquired the significance of a definite political tendency, which I will now explain.[47]

The whole class of commoners outside the nobility was divided, when the French Revolution began, and is still divided in general, into two subordinate classes—first, those who get their living chiefly or entirely from their labor, and are supported in this by very little capital, or none at all, which might give them the possibility of actively engaging in production for the support of themselves and their families; to this class, accordingly, belong the laborers, the lower middle class, the artisans, and, in general, the peasants; second, those who control a large amount of property and capital, and on that basis engage in production or receive an income from it. These can be called the capitalists; but no capitalist is a bourgeois merely because of his wealth.

No commoner has any objection to a nobleman's rejoicing privately over his ancestry and his landed estates. But if the nobleman tries to make these ancestors or these landed estates the condition of special influence and privilege in the government, of control over public policy, then the anger of the commoner rises against the nobleman and he calls him a feudalist.

Conditions are the same with reference to the actual difference of property within the class of commoners. If the capitalist rejoices in private over the great convenience and advantage which a large estate implies for the holder, nothing is more simple, more moral, and more lawful.

To whatever extent the laborer and the poorer citizen—in a word, all classes outside the capitalists—are entitled to demand from the State that its whole thought and effort be directed toward improving the lamentable and poverty-stricken material condition of the working classes and toward assuring to them, through whose hands all the wealth is produced of which our civilization boasts, to whose hands all products owe their being, without whom society as a whole could not exist another day, a more abundant and less uncertain revenue, and thus the possibility of intellectual culture, and, in time, an existence really worthy of a human being—however much, I say, the working classes are entitled to demand this from the State and to establish this as its true object, the workingmen must and will never forget that all property once lawfully acquired is completely inviolable and legitimate.

But if the capitalist, not satisfied with the actual advantages of large property, tries to establish the possession of capital as a condition for participation in the control of the State and in the determination of public policy, then the capitalist becomes a bourgeois, then he makes the fact of possession the legal condition of political control, then he characterizes himself as a new privileged class which attempts to put the controlling stamp of its privileges upon all social institutions in as full a degree as the nobility in the Middle Ages did with the privilege of landholding.

The question therefore which we must raise with reference to the French Revolution and the period of history inaugurated by it, is the following: Has the third class, which came into control through the French Revolution, looked upon itself as a bourgeoisie in this sense, and has it attempted successfully to subject the people to its privileged political control?

The answer is given by the great facts of history, and this answer is definitely in the affirmative. In the very first constitution which followed the French Revolution—the one of September 3, 1791—the difference between citoyen actif and citoyen passif—the "active" and "passive" citizen—is set forth. Only the active citizens received the franchise, and the active citizen, according to this constitution, is no other than one who pays a direct tax of a definitely stated amount.

This tax was at that time very moderate. It was only the value of three days' work: but what was more important was that all those were declared passive citizens who were serviteurs a gages (wage earners), a definition by which the working class was expressly excluded from the franchise. After all, in such questions the essential point is not the extent, but the principle.

This meant the introduction of a property qualification, the establishment of a definite amount of property as the condition of the franchise—this first and most important of all political rights—and in the determination of public policy.

All those who paid no direct tax at all, or less than this fixed amount, and those who were wage earners, were excluded from control of the State and were made a subject body. The ownership of capital had become the condition for control over the State, as was nobility, or ownership of land, in the Middle Ages.

This principle of property qualification remains (with the exception of a very short period during the French Republic of 1793, which perished from its own indefiniteness and from the whole state of society at the time, which I cannot here discuss further) the leading principle of all constitutions which originated in the French Revolution.

In fact, with the consistency which all principles have, this one was soon forced to develop into a different quantitative scope. In the constitution of 1814, according to the classified list promulgated by Louis XVIII., a direct tax of three hundred francs (eighty thalers) was established, in place of the value of three days' work, as a condition of the franchise. The July Revolution of 1830 broke out, and nevertheless, by the law of April 19, 1831, a direct tax of two hundred francs (about fifty-three thalers) was required as a condition of the franchise.

What under Louis Philippe and Guizot was called the pays legal—that is, the country as a legal entity—consisted of 200,000 men; for there were not more than 200,000 electors in France who could meet the property requirement, and these exercised sovereignty over more than 30,000,000 inhabitants. It is here to be noted that it makes no difference whether the principle of property qualification, the exclusion of those without property from the franchise, appears, as in the constitutions referred to, in direct and open form, or in a form in one way or another disguised. The effect is always the same.

So the second French Republic in 1850 could not possibly revoke the general direct franchise, once proclaimed, which we shall later consider, but adopted the expedient of granting the franchise (law of May 31,1850) only to such citizens as had been domiciled in a place without interruption for at least three years. For, because workingmen in France are frequently compelled by conditions to change their domicile and to look for work in another commune, it was hoped, and with good reason, that extremely large numbers of workingmen, who could not bring proof of three years uninterrupted residence in the same place, would be excluded from the franchise.

Here you have a property qualification in disguised form. It is still worse in our country, since the promulgation of the three-class election law, under which, with variations according to locality, three, ten, thirty, or more voters without property, of the third class of electors, have only the same franchise as one single capitalist who belongs to the first class; so that, in fact, if the proportion were only one to ten, nine men out of every ten who had the franchise in 1848 have lost it through the three-class election law of 1849, and exercise it only in appearance.[48]

But this is only the average situation. In reality, conditions vary greatly in different localities, and they are often still more unfavorable, most unfavorable in fact where the inequality of property is most developed; thus for instance, in Duesseldorf twenty-six voters of the third class have no more power than one rich man.

If we return from this discussion to our main thought, we have shown, and shall continue to show, in what manner, since the time when, through the French Revolution, the capitalist element obtained sovereignty, its principle, the possession of capital, has now become the controlling principle of all social institutions; how the capitalist class, proceeding in just the same manner as the nobility in the Middle Ages with land ownership, impresses now the controlling and exclusive stamp of its particular principle, the possession of capital, upon all institutions of society. The parallel between the nobility and the capitalist class is, in this respect, complete. We have already seen this with regard to the most important fundamental point, the constitution of the Empire. As in the Middle Ages landholding was the prevailing principle of representation in the German parliaments, so now, by a direct or disguised property qualification, the amount of tax, and therefore, since this is determined by the capital of an individual, the holding of capital, is what, in the last instance, determines the right of election to legislative bodies and therefore of participation in the control of the State.

Just so in reference to all other institutions in which I have demonstrated to you that land ownership was the controlling principle in the Middle Ages. I called your attention then to the exemption from taxation of the noble landholders of the Middle Ages, and told you that every privileged ruling class tries to throw the burden for the maintenance of public welfare upon the oppressed propertyless class. Just so the capitalists. To be sure they cannot declare publicly that they wish to be exempt from taxation. Their expressed principle is rather the rule that everybody shall be taxed in proportion to income; but, on the other hand, they attain, at least fairly well, the same result in disguised form by the distinction between direct and indirect taxes.

Direct taxes are those which, like the classified income tax, are collected, and therefore are determined, according to the amount of income and capital. Indirect taxes, however, are those which are laid upon any necessity—for instance, salt, grain, beer, meat, fuel; or on the necessity for legal protection—law costs, stamp taxes, etc., and which the individual very frequently pays in the price of the commodity without knowing or perceiving that he is being taxed, that the tax increases the price.

Now no man, of course, who is twenty, fifty, or a hundred times as rich as another eats by any means twenty, fifty or a hundred times as much salt, or bread, or meat; or drinks fifty or a hundred times as much beer or wine; or has fifty or a hundred times as much need for heat, and therefore for fuel, as the workingman or the relatively poor man.

The result of this is that all indirect taxes, instead of falling upon individuals according to the proportion of their capital and income, are paid in the main by the propertyless classes, the poorer classes of the nation. It is true that the capitalists did not invent indirect taxes—they were already in existence—but they were the first to develop them into a monstrous system and to throw upon them nearly the whole cost of government. To make this clear to you, I will simply allude to the Prussian financial administration of 1855. (Shows by official statistics that out of a budget of 109,000,000 thalers all but 12,800,000 were derived from indirect taxes.)

Indirect taxation is therefore the institution through which the capitalistic class obtains the privilege of exemption for its capital and lays the cost of the government upon the poorer classes of society.

Observe, at the same time, Gentlemen, the peculiar contradiction and the strange kind of justice of the procedure of laying the whole expense upon indirect taxation, and therefore upon the poor people, and of setting up as a test and a condition of the franchise, and therefore of political control, the direct taxes, which contribute for the total need of the State only the insignificant sum of twelve million out of one hundred and eight million.