CHAPTER III.

FERDINAND LASSALLE.

German socialism is--it is hardly too much to say--the creation of

Ferdinand Lassalle. Of course there were socialists in Germany before

Lassalle. There are socialists everywhere. A certain rudimentary

socialism is always in latent circulation in what may be called the

"natural heart" of society. The secret clubs of China--"the fraternal

leagues of heaven and earth"--who argue that the world is iniquitously

arranged, that the rich are too rich, and the poor too poor, and that

the wealth of the great has all accrued from the sweat of the masses,

only give a formal expression to ideas that are probably never far from

any one of us who have to work hard and earn little, and they merely

formulate them less systematically than Marx and his disciples do in

their theories of the exploitation of labour by capital. Socialism is

thus so much in the common air we all breathe, that there is force in

the view that the thing to account for is not so much the presence of

socialism, at any time, as its absence. Accordingly it had frequently

appeared in Germany under various forms before Lassalle. Fichte--to go

no farther back--had taught it from the standpoint of the speculative

philosopher and philanthropist. Schleiermacher, it may be remembered,

was brought up in a religious community that practised it. Weitling,

with some allies, preached it in a pithless and hazy way as a gospel to

the poor, and, finding little encouragement, went to America, to work it

out experimentally there. The Young Hegelians made it part of their

philosophic creed. The Silesian weavers, superseded by machinery, and

perishing for want of work, raised it as a wild inarticulate cry for

bread, and dignified it with the sanction of tears and blood. And Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1848, summoned the proletariat of the

whole world to make it the aim and instrument of a universal revolution.

But it was Lassalle who first really brought it from the clouds and made

it a living historical force in the common politics of the day. The late

eminent Professor Lorenz von Stein, of Vienna, said, in 1842, in his

acute and thoughtful work on French Communism, that Germany, unlike

France, and particularly England, had nothing to fear from socialism,

because Germany had no proletariat to speak of. Yet, in twenty years, we

find Germany become suddenly the theatre of the most important and

formidable embodiment of socialism that has anywhere appeared. Important

and formidable, for two reasons: it founds its doctrines, as socialism

has never done before, on a thoroughly scientific investigation of the

facts, and criticism of the principles, of the present industrial

_regime_, and it seeks to carry them out by means of a political

organization, growing singularly in strength, and based on the class

interests of the great majority of the people.

There were, of course, predisposing conditions for this outburst. A

German proletariat had come into being since Stein wrote, and though

still much smaller, in the aggregate, than the English, it was perhaps

really at this time the more plethoric and distressed of the two. For

the condition of the English working-classes had been greatly relieved

by emigration, by factory legislation, by trades unions, whereas in some

of these directions nothing at all, and in others only the faintest

beginnings, had as yet been effected in Germany. Then, the stir of big

political movement and anticipation was on men's minds. The future of

the German nation, its unity, its freedom, its development, were

practical questions of the hour. The nationality principle is

essentially democratic, and the aspirations for German unity carried

with them in every one of the States strong movements for the extension

of popular freedom and power. This long spasmodic battle for liberty in

Germany, which began with the century, and remains still unsettled, this

long series of revolts and concessions and overridings, and hopes

flattered and again deferred, this long uncertain babble of

_Gross-Deutsch_ and _Klein-Deutsch_, and Centralist and Federalist and

Particularist, of "Gotha ideas" and "new eras" and "blood and iron,"

had prepared the public ear for bold political solutions, and has

entered from the first as an active and not unimportant factor in the

socialist agitation. Then again, the general political habits and

training of the people must be taken into account. Socialistic ideas

would find a readier vogue in Germany than in this country, because the

people are less rigidly practical, because they have been less used to

the sifting exercise of free discussion, and because they have always

seen the State doing a great deal for them which they could do better

for themselves, and are consequently apt to visit the State with blame

and claims for which it ought not to be made responsible. Then the

decline of religious belief in Germany, which the Church herself did

much to produce when she was rationalistic, without being able to undo

it since she has become orthodox, must certainly have impaired the

patience with which the poor endured the miseries of their lot, when

they still entertained the hope of exchanging it in a few short years

for a happier and an everlasting one hereafter.

All these circumstances undoubtedly favoured the success of the

socialistic agitation at the period it started; but, when everything is

said, it is still doubtful whether German socialism would ever have come

into being but for Lassalle. Its fermenting principle has been less want

than positive ideas. This is shown by the fact that it was at first

received among the German working classes with an apathy that almost

disheartened Lassalle; and that it is now zealously propagated by them

as a cause, as an evangel, even after they have emigrated to America,

where their circumstances are comparatively comfortable. The ideas it

contains Lassalle found for the most part ready to his hand. The germs

of them may be discovered in the writings of Proudhon, in the projects

of Louis Blanc. Some of them he acknowledges he owes to Rodbertus,

others to Karl Marx, but it was in passing through his mind they first

acquired the stamp and ring that made them current coin. Contentions

about the priority of publishing this bit or that bit of an idea,

especially if the idea be false, need not concern us; and indeed

Lassalle makes no claim to originality in the economical field. He was

not so much an inventive as a critical thinker, and a critical thinker

of almost the first rank, with a dialectic power, and a clear, vivid

exposition that have seldom been excelled. Any originality that is

claimed for him lies in the region of interpretation of previous

thought, and that in the departments of metaphysics and jurisprudence,

not of economics.

The peculiarity of his mind was that it hungered with almost equal

intensity for profound study and for exciting action, and that he had

the gifts as well as the impulses for both. As he said of Heraclitus the

Dark, whom he spent some of his best years in expounding, "there was

storm in his nature." Heine, who knew and loved him well as a young man

in Paris, and indeed found his society so delightful during his last

years of haggard suffering, that he said, "No one has ever done so much

for me, and when I receive letters from you, courage rises in me, and I

feel better,"--Heine characterizes him very truly in a letter to

Varnhagen von Ense. He says he was struck with astonishment at the

combination of qualities Lassalle displayed--the union of so much

intellectual power, deep learning, rich exposition on the one hand, with

so much energy of will and capacity for action on the other. With all

this admiration, however, he seems unable to regard him without

misgiving, for his audacious confidence, checked by no thought of

renunciation or tremor of modesty, amazed him as much as his ability. In

this respect he says Lassalle is a genuine son of the modern time, to

which Varnhagen and himself had acted in a way as the midwives, but on

which they could only look like the hen that hatched duck's eggs and

shuddered to see how her brood took to the water and swam about

delighted. Heine here puts his finger on the secret of his young

friend's failure. Lassalle would have been a great man if he had more of

the ordinary restraining perceptions, but he had neither fear nor awe,

nor even--in spite of his vein of satire--a wholesome sense of the

ridiculous,--in this last respect resembling, if we believe Carlyle, all

Jews. Chivalrous, susceptible, with a genuine feeling for the poor man's

case, and a genuine enthusiasm for social reform, a warm friend, a

vindictive enemy, full of ambition both of the nobler and the more

vulgar type, beset with an importunate vanity and given to primitive

lusts; generous qualities and churlish throve and strove in him side by

side, and governed or misgoverned a will to which opposition was almost

a native and necessary element, and which yet--or perhaps rather,

therefore--brooked no check. "Ferdinand Lassalle, thinker and fighter,"

is the simple epitaph Professor Boeckh put on his tomb. Thinking and

fighting were the craving of his nature; thinking and fighting were the

warp and woof of his actual career, mingled indeed with threads of more

spurious fibre. The philosophical thinker and the political agitator are

parts rarely combined in one person, but to these Lassalle added yet a

third, which seems to agree with neither. He was a fashionable dandy,

noted for his dress, for his dinners, and, it must be added, for his

addiction to pleasure--a man apparently with little of that solidarity

in his own being which he sought to introduce into society at large, and

yet his public career possesses an undoubted unity. It is a mistake to

represent him, as Mr. L. Montefiore has done, as a _savan_ who turned

politician as if by accident and against his will, for the stir of

politics was as essential to him as the absorption of study. It is a

greater mistake, though a more common one, to represent him as having

become a revolutionary agitator because no other political career was

open to him. He felt himself, it is said, like a Caesar out of employ,

disqualified for all legitimate politics by his previous life, and he

determined, if he could not bend the gods, that he would move Acheron.

But so early as 1848, when yet but a lad of twenty-three, he was tried

for sedition, and he then declared boldly in his defence that he was a

socialist democrat, and that he was "revolutionary on principle." This

he remained throughout. He laughs at those who cannot hear the word

revolution without a shudder. "Revolution," he says, "means merely

transformation, and is accomplished when an entirely new principle

is--either with force or without it--put in the place of an existing

state of things. Reform, on the other hand, is when the principle of the

existing state of things is continued, and only developed to more

logical or just consequences. The means do not signify. A reform may be

carried out by bloodshed, and a revolution in the profoundest

tranquillity. The Peasants' War was an attempt to introduce reform by

arms, the invention of the spinning-jenny wrought a peaceful

revolution." In this sense he was "revolutionary on principle." His

thought was revolutionary, and it was the lessons he learnt as a

philosopher that he applied and pled for an agitator. His thinking and

his fighting belonged together like powder and shot. His Hegelianism,

which he adopted as a youth at college, is from first to last the

continuous source both of impetus and direction over his public career.

Young Germany was Hegelian and revolutionary at the time he went to the

University (1842), and with the impressionable Lassalle, then a youth of

seventeen, Hegelianism became a passion. He wrote articles on it in

University magazines, preached it right and left in the _cafes_ and

taverns, and resolved to make philosophy his profession and establish

himself as a _privat Docent_ at Berlin University. It was the first

sovereign intellectual influence he came under, and it ruled his spirit

to the end. In adopting it, his intellectual manhood may be said to have

opened with a revolution, for his family were strict Jews, and he was

brought up in their religion.

Lassalle was born in 1825 at Breslau, where his father was a wholesale

dealer. He was educated at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin, and

at the latter city saw, through the Mendelssohns, a good deal of the

best literary society there, and made the acquaintance, among others, of

Alexander von Humboldt, who used to call him a _Wunderkind_. On

finishing his curriculum, he went for a time to Paris, and formed there

a close friendship with H. Heine, who was an old acquaintance of his

family. He meant to qualify himself as _privat Docent_ when he returned,

but was diverted from his purpose by the task of redressing a woman's

wrongs, into which he flew with the romantic enterprise of a

knight-errant, and which he carried, through years of patient and

zealous labour, to a successful issue. The Countess Hatzfeldt had been

married when a girl of sixteen to a cousin of her own, one of the great

nobles of Germany; but the marriage turned out most unhappily after a

few years, and she was obliged, on account of the maltreatment she

suffered, to live apart from her husband. His persecution followed her

into her separation. He took child after child from her, and was now

seeking to take the last she had left, her youngest son. He allowed her

very scanty and irregular support, while he lavished his money on

mistresses, and was, at this very moment, settling on one of them an

annuity of L1,000. This state of things had continued for twenty years,

and the Countess's own relations had, for family reasons, always

declined to take up her case. Lassalle, who had made her acquaintance in

Berlin, was profoundly touched by her story, and felt that she was

suffering an intolerable wrong, which society permitted only because she

was a woman, and her husband a lord. Though not a lawyer, he resolved to

undertake her case, and after carrying the suit before thirty-six

different courts, during a period of eight years, he at length procured

for her a divorce in 1851, and a princely fortune in 1854, from which

she rewarded him with a considerable annuity for his exertions.

Lassalle's connection with this case not unnaturally gave rise to

sinister construction. It was supposed he must have been in love with

the Countess, and wanted to marry her, but this was disproved by the

event. Darker insinuations were made, but had there been truth in them,

it could not have escaped the spies the Count sent to watch him, and the

servants the Count bribed to inform on him. Chivalry, vanity, and

temerity at the season of life when all three qualities are at their

height, account sufficiently for his whole conduct, and I see no reason

to doubt the explanation he himself gives of it. "Her family," he

states, "were silent, but it is said when men keep silence the stones

will speak. When every human right is violated, when even the voice of

blood is mute, and helpless man is forsaken by his born protectors,

there then rises with right man's first and last relation--man. You have

all read with emotion the monstrous history of the unhappy Duchess of

Praslin. Who is there among you that would not have gone to the death to

defend her? Well, gentlemen, I said to myself, here is Praslin ten times

over. What is the sharp death-agony of an hour compared with the pangs

of death protracted over twenty years? What are the wounds a knife

inflicts compared with the slow murder dispensed with refined cruelty

throughout a being's whole existence? What are they compared with the

immense woe of this woman, every right of whose life has been trampled

under foot, day after day, for twenty years, and whom they have first

tried to cover with contempt, that they might then the more securely

overwhelm her with punishment?... The difficulties, the sacrifices, the

dangers did not deter me. I determined to meet false appearances with

the truth, to meet rank with right, to meet the power of money with the

power of mind. But if I had known what infamous calumnies I should have

to encounter, how people turned the purest motives into their

contraries, and what ready credence they gave to the most wretched

lies--well, I hope my purpose would not have been changed, but it would

have cost me a severe and bitter struggle." There seems almost something

unmodern in the whole circumstances of this case, both in the oppression

the victim endured, and in the manner of her rescue.

In the course of this suit occurred the robbery of Baroness von

Meyerdorff's _cassette_, on which so much has been said. The Baroness

was the person already mentioned on whom Count Hatzfeldt bestowed the

annuity of L1,000. The Countess, on hearing of this settlement, went

straight to her husband, accompanied by a clergyman, and insisted upon

him cancelling it, in justice to his youngest son, whom it would have

impoverished. The Count at first promised to do so, but after her

departure, refused, and the Baroness set out for Aix to get her bond

effectually secured. Lassalle suspected the object of her journey, and

said to the Countess, in the presence of two young friends, Could we not

obtain possession of this bond? No sooner said than done. The two young

men started for Cologne, and one of them stole the Baroness's

_cassette_, containing the veritable deed, in her hotel, and gave it to

the other. They and Lassalle were all three successively tried for their

part in this crime. Oppenheim, who actually stole the _cassette_, was

acquitted; Mendelssohn, who only received it, was sent to prison; and

Lassalle, who certainly suggested the deed, was found guilty by the

jury, but acquitted by the judges. Moral complicity of some sort was

clear, but it did not amount to a legal crime. Our interest with the

transaction is merely to discover the light it reflects on the character

of the man. It was a rash, foolish, and lawless freak, but of course the

ordinary motives of the robber were absent. The theft of the

_cassette_, however, was a transaction which his enemies never suffered

to be forgotten.

The theft of the _cassette_ occurred in 1846; Lassalle was tried for it

in 1848, and was no sooner released than he fell into the hands of

justice on a much more serious charge. The dissolution of the first

Prussian National Assembly in 1848, and the gift of a Constitution by

direct royal decree, had excited bitter disappointment and opposition

over the whole country. There was a general agitation for combining to

stop supplies by refusing to pay taxes, in order thus "to meet force

with force," and this agitation was particularly active in the Rhine

provinces, where democratic views had found much favour. Lassalle even

planned an insurrection, and urged the citizens of Dusseldorf to armed

resistance; but the Prussian Government promptly intervened, placed the

town under a state of siege, and threw Lassalle into jail. He was tried

in 1849 for treason, and acquitted by the jury, but was immediately

afterwards brought before a correctional tribunal on the minor charge of

resisting officers of the police, and sent to prison for six months. It

was in his speech at the former of these trials that he declared himself

a partisan of the Socialist Democratic Republic, and claimed for every

citizen the right and duty of active resistance to the State when

necessary. He had nothing but scorn to pour on the passive resistance

policy of the Parliament. "Passive resistance is a contradiction in

itself. It is like Lichtenberg's knife, without blade, and without

handle, or like the fleece which one must wash without wetting. It is

mere inward ill-will without the outward deed. The Crown confiscates the

people's freedom; and the Prussian National Assembly, for the people's

protection, declares ill-will; it would be unintelligible how the

commonest logic should have allowed a legislative assembly to cover

itself with such incomparable ridicule if it were not too intelligible."

These are bold words. He felt himself standing on a principle and

representing a cause; and so he went into prison, he tells us, with as

light a heart as he would have gone to a ball; and when he heard that

his sister had petitioned for his pardon, he wrote instantly and

publicly disclaimed her letter.

All these trials had brought Lassalle into considerable notoriety, not

unmingled with a due recognition of his undoubted _verve_, eloquence,

and brilliancy. One effect of them was that he was forbidden to come to

Berlin. This prohibition was founded, of course, on his seditious work

at Dusseldorf, but is believed to have been instigated and kept up by

the influence of the Hatzfeldt family. Lassalle felt it a sore

privation, for his ambitions and hopes all centred in Berlin. After

various ineffectual attempts to obtain permission, he arrived in the

capital one day in 1857 disguised as a waggoner, and through the

personal intercession of Alexander von Humboldt with the king, was at

length suffered to remain. His "Heraclitus" had just appeared, and at

once secured him a position in literary circles. One of his first

productions after his return to Berlin was a pamphlet on "The Italian

War and the Mission of Prussia; a Voice from the Democracy," which shows

that his political prosecutions had not soured him against Prussia. His

argument is that freedom and democracy must in Germany, as in Italy, be

first preceded by unity, and that the only power capable of giving unity

to Germany was Prussia, as to Italy, Piedmont. He had more of the

political mind than most revolutionaries and doctrinaires, and knew that

the better might be made the enemy of the good, and that ideals could

only be carried out gradually, and by temporary compromises. He was

monarchical for the present, therefore, no doubt because he thought the

monarchy to be for the time the best and shortest road to the democratic

republic. His friend Rodbertus said there was an esoteric and an

exoteric Lassalle. That may be said of all politicians. Compromise is of

the essence of their work.

During the next few years Lassalle's literary activity was considerable.

Besides a tragedy of no merit ("Franz von Sickingen," 1859) and various

pamphlets or lectures on Fichte, on Lessing, on the Constitution, on

Might and Right, he published in 1861 the most important work he has

left us, his "System of Acquired Rights," and in 1862 a satirical

commentary on Julian Schmidt's "History of German Literature," which

excited much attention and amusement at the time. His "System of

Acquired Rights" already contains the germs of his socialist views, and

his pamphlet on the Constitution, which appeared when the "new era"

ended and the era of Bismarck began, is written to disparage the

Constitutionalism of modern Liberals. A paper constitution was a thing

of no consequence; it was merely declarative, not creative; the thing of

real account was the distribution of power as it existed in actual fact.

The king and army were powers, the court and nobility were powers, the

populace was a power. Society was governed by the relative strength of

these powers, as it existed in reality and not by the paper constitution

that merely chronicled it. Right is regarded as merely declarative of

might. It is thus easy to see why he should have more sympathy with the

policy of Bismarck than with the Liberals; and later in the same year he

expounded his own political position very completely in a lecture he

delivered to a Working Men's Society in Berlin, on "The Connection

between the Present Epoch of History and the Idea of the Working Class."

This lecture, to which I shall again revert, was an epoch in his own

career. It led to a second Government prosecution, and a second

imprisonment for political reasons; and it and the prosecution together

led to his receiving an invitation to address a General Working Men's

Congress at Leipzig, in February, 1863, to which he responded by a

letter, sketching the political programme of the working class, which

was certainly the first step in the socialist movement.

Attention was already being engaged on the work of industrial

amelioration. The Progressist party, then including the present National

Liberals, had, under the lead of Schultze-Delitzsch, been promoting

trades unions and co-operation in an experimental way, and the working

classes themselves were beginning to think of taking more concerted

action for their own improvement. The Leipzig Congress was projected by

a circle of working men, who considered the Schultze-Delitzsch schemes

inadequate to meet the case. This was exactly Lassalle's view. He begins

his letter by telling the working men that if all they wanted was to

mitigate some of the positive evils of their lot, then the

Schultze-Delitzsch unions, savings banks, and sick funds were quite

sufficient, and there was no need of thinking of anything more. But if

their aim was to elevate the _normal_ condition of their class, then

more drastic remedies were requisite; and, in the first instance, a

political agitation was indispensable. The Leipzig working men had

discussed the question of their relation to politics at a previous

congress a few months before, and had been divided between abstaining

from politics altogether, and supporting the Progressist party. Lassalle

disapproved of both these courses. They could never achieve the

elevation they desired till they got universal suffrage, and they would

never get universal suffrage by backing the Progressists who were

opposed to it. He then explains to them how their normal condition is

permanently depressed at present by the essential laws of the existing

economic _regime_, especially by "the iron and cruel law of necessary

wages." The only real cure was co-operative production, the substitution

of associated labour for wage labour; for it was only so the operation

of this tyrannical law of wages could be escaped. Now co-operative

production, to be of any effective extent, must be introduced by State

help and on State credit. The State gave advances to start railways, to

develop agriculture, to promote manufactures, and nobody called it

socialism to do so. Why, then, should people cry socialism if the State

did a similar service to the great working class, who were, in fact, not

a class, but the State itself. 961/2 per cent. of the population were

ground down by "the iron law," and could not possibly lift themselves

above it by their own power. They must ask the State to help them, for

they were themselves the State, and the help of the State was no more a

superseding of their own self-help than reaching a man a ladder

superseded his own climbing. State help was but self-help's means. Now

these State advances could not be expected till the working class

acquired political power by universal suffrage. Their first duty was

therefore to organize themselves and agitate for universal suffrage; for

universal suffrage was a question of the stomach.

The reception his letter met with at first was most discouraging. The

newspapers with one consent condemned it, except a Feudalist organ here

and there who saw in it an instrument for damaging the Liberals. What

seemed more ominous was the opposition of the working men themselves.

The Leipzig Committee to whom it was addressed did indeed approve of

it, and individual voices were raised in its favour elsewhere, but in

Berlin the working men's clubs rejected it with decided warmth, and all

over the country one working men's club after another declared against

it. Leipzig was the only place in which his words seemed to find any

echo, and he went there two months later and addressed a meeting at

which only 7 out of 1,300 voted against him. With this encouragement he

resolved to go forward, and founded, on the 23rd of May, 1863, the

General Working Men's Association for the promotion of universal

suffrage by peaceful agitation, after the model of the English Anti-Corn

Law League. He immediately threw himself with unsparing energy into the

development of this organization. He passed from place to place,

delivering speeches, establishing branches; he started newspapers, wrote

pamphlets, and even larger works, published tracts by Rodbertus, songs

by Herwegh, romances by Von Schweitzer. But it was uphill work. South

Germany was evidently dead to his ideas, and even among those who

followed him in the North there were but few who really understood his

doctrines or concurred in his methods. Some were for more "heroic"

procedure, for raising fighting corps to free Poland, to free

Schleswig-Holstein, to free oppressed nationalities anywhere. Many were

perfectly impracticable persons who knew neither why exactly they had

come together, nor where exactly they would like to go. There were

constant quarrels and rivalries and jealousies among them, and he is

said to have shown remarkable tact and patience, and a genuine governing

faculty in dealing with them. Lassalle's hope was to obtain a membership

of 100,000: with a smaller number nothing could be done, but with

100,000 the movement would be a power. In August, 1863, he had only

enrolled 1,000 after three months' energetic labour, which, he said,

"would have produced colossal results among a people like the French."

He was intensely disappointed, and asked, "When will this foolish people

cast aside their lethargy?" but meanwhile repelled the suggestion of the

secretary of the organization that it should be at once dissolved. In

August, 1864, another year's strenuous work had raised their numbers

only to 4,610, and Lassalle was completely disenchanted, and wrote

Countess Hatzfeldt from Switzerland, shortly before his death, that he

was continuing President of the Association much against his will, for

he was now tired of politics, which was mere child's play if one had not

power. He seems to have been convinced that the movement was a failure,

and would never become a force in the State. Yet he was wrong; his words

had really taken fire among the working classes, and kindled a movement

which, in its curious history, has shown the remarkable power of

spreading faster with the checks it encounters. It seems to have

profited, not merely from political measures of repression, but even

from the internal dissensions and divisions of its own adherents, and

some persons tell us that it was first stimulated into decided vigour by

the fatal event which might have been expected to crush it--the sudden

and tragical death of its chief.

In the end of July, 1864, Lassalle went to Switzerland ostensibly for

the Righi whey cure, but really to make the acquaintance of Herr von

Doennigsen, Bavarian Envoy at Berne, whose daughter he had known in

Berlin, and wished to obtain in marriage. It is one of the fatalities

that entangled this man's life in strange contradictions, that exactly

he, a _persona ingratissima_ to Court circles, their very arch-enemy, as

they believed, should have become bound by deep mutual attachment with

the daughter of exactly a German diplomatist, the courtliest of the

courtly, a Conservative seven times refined. They certainly cherished

for one another a sincere, and latterly a passionate affection, and they

seem to have been well fitted for each other. Helena von Doennigsen was a

bright, keen-witted, eccentric, adventurous young woman of twenty-five,

and so like Lassalle, even in appearance, that when she was acting a

man's part, years afterwards (in 1874), in some amateur performance in

the theatre of Breslau, Lassalle's native town, many of the audience

said, here was Lassalle again as he was when a boy. Learning from a

common friend in Berlin that Lassalle was at the Righi, she made a visit

to some friends in Berne, and soon after accompanied them on an

excursion to that "popular" mountain. She inquired for Lassalle at the

hotel, and he joined the party to the summit. She knew her parents would

be opposed to the match, but felt certain that her lover, with his

gifts and charms, would be able to win them over, and it was accordingly

agreed that when she returned to Geneva, Lassalle should go there too,

and press his suit in person. The parents, however, were inexorable, and

refused to see him; and the young lady in despair fled from her father's

house to her lover's lodging, and urged him to elope with her. Lassalle

calmly led her back to her father's roof, with a control which some

writers think quite inexplicable in him, but which was probably due to

his still believing that he would be able to talk the parents round if

he got the chance, and to his desire to try constitutional means before

resorting to revolutionary. Helena was locked in her room for days alone

with her excited brain and panting heart. For days, father, mother,

sister, brother, all came and laid before her what ruin she was bringing

on the family for a mere selfish whim of her own. If she married a man

so objectionable to people in power, her father would be obliged to

resign his post, her brother could never look for one, and her sister,

who had just been engaged to a Count, would, of course, have to give up

her engagement. She was in despair, but ultimately submitted passively

to write to Lassalle, desiring him to consider the matter ended, and

submitted equally passively (for she informs us herself) to accept the

hand of Herr von Racowitza, a young Wallachian Boyar, whom she had

indeed been previously engaged to, and sincerely liked and respected,

without in the eminent sense loving him. Lassalle had meanwhile wrought

himself into a fury of excitement. Enraged by her parents' opposition,

enraged still more by their refusal even to treat with him, enraged

above all by his belief that their daughter was being illegitimately

constrained, he wrote here, wrote there, tried to get the foreign

minister at Munich to interfere, to get Bishop Ketteler to use his

influence, promised even to turn Catholic to please the Doennigsens,

forgetting that they were Protestants. All in vain. At last two of his

friends waited by appointment on Herr von Doennigsen, and heard from

Helena's own lips that she was to be married to the Boyar, and wished

the subject no more mentioned. She now tells us that she did this in

sheer weariness of mind, and with a confused hope that somehow or other

the present storm would blow past, and she might have her Lassalle

after all. Lassalle, however, was overcome with chagrin; and though he

always held that a democrat should not fight duels, and had got

Robespierre's stick, which he usually carried, as a present for having

declined one, he now sent a challenge both to the father and the

bridegroom. The latter accepted. The duel was fought. Lassalle was

fatally wounded, and died two days after, on the 31st August, 1864, at

the age of 39. Helena married Herr von Racowitza shortly afterwards, but

he was already seized with consumption, and she says she found great

comfort, after the tumult and excitement of the Lassalle episode, in

nursing him during the few months he lived after their marriage.

The body was sent back to Germany, after funeral orations from

revolutionists of all countries and colours, and the Countess Hatzfeldt

had made arrangements for similar funeral celebrations at every halting

place along the route to Berlin, where she meant it to be buried, but at

Cologne it was intercepted by the police on behalf of the Lassalle

family, and carried quietly to Breslau, where, after life's fitful

fever, he was laid silently with his fathers in the Jewish

burying-ground of his native place. Fate, however, had not even yet done

with him. It followed him beyond the tomb to throw one more element of

the bizarre into his strangely compounded history. Lest the death of the

leader should prove fatal to the cause, the Committee of the General

Working Men's Association determined to turn it, if possible, into a

source of strength, as B. Becker, his successor in the president's

chair, informs us, "by carrying it into the domain of faith." Lassalle

was not dead, but only translated to a higher and surer leadership. A

Lassalle _cultus_ was instituted, and Becker says that many a German

working man believed that he died for them, and that he was yet to come

again to save them. This singular apotheosis, which is neither

creditable to the honesty of the leaders of the socialist movement, nor

to the intelligence of its rank and file, was kept up by periodical

celebrations among those of the German socialists who are generally

known as the orthodox Lassalleans, down, at least, to the time of the

Anti-Socialist Law of 1878.

Lassalle's doctrines are mainly contained in his lecture on "The

Present Age and the Idea of the Working Class," which he delivered in

1862, and published in 1863, under the title of the "Working Men's

Programme," and in his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze von Delitzsch, der

Oekonomische Julian; oder Capital und Arbeit," Berlin, 1864.

In the "Working Men's Programme," the question of the emancipation of

the working class is approached and contemplated from the standpoint of

the Hegelian philosophy of history. There are, it declares, three

successive stages of evolution in modern history. First, the period

before 1789, the feudal period, when all public power was vested in,

exercised by, and employed for the benefit of, the landed class. It was

a period of privileges and exemptions, which were enjoyed by the landed

interests exclusively, and there prevailed a strong social contempt for

all labour and employment not connected with the land. Second, the

period 1789-1848, the _bourgeois_ period, in which personal estate

received equal rights and recognition with real, but in which political

power was still based on property qualifications, and legislation was

governed by the interests of the _bourgeoisie_. Third, the period since

1848, the age of the working class, which is, however, only yet

struggling to the birth and to legal recognition. The characteristic of

this new period is, that it will for the first time give labour its

rights, and that it will be dominated by the ideas, aspirations, and

interests of the great labouring class. Their time has already come, and

the _bourgeois_ age is already past in fact, though it still lingers in

law. It is always so. The feudal period had in reality come to an end

before the Revolution. A revolution is always declarative and never

creative. It takes place first in the heart of society, and is only

sealed and ratified by the outbreak. "It is impossible to make a

revolution, it is possible only to give external legal sanction and

effect to a revolution already contained in the actual circumstances of

society.... To seek to make a revolution is the folly of immature men

who have no consideration for the laws of history; and for the same

reason it is immature and puerile to try to stem a revolution that has

already completed itself in the interior of society. If a revolution

exists in fact, it cannot possibly be prevented from ultimately existing

in law." It is idle, too, to reproach those who desire to effect this

transition with being revolutionary. They are merely midwives who assist

in bringing to the birth a future with which society is already

pregnant. Now, it is this midwife service that Lassalle believed the

working class at present required. He says of the fourth estate what

Sieyes said of the third, What is the fourth estate? Nothing? What ought

the fourth estate to be? Everything. And it ought to be so in law,

because it is so already in fact. The _bourgeoisie_, in overthrowing the

privileges of the feudal class, had almost immediately become a

privileged class itself. At so early a period of the revolution as the

3rd of September, 1791, a distinction was introduced between active and

passive citizens. The active citizen was the citizen who paid direct

taxes, and had therefore a right to vote; the passive citizen was he who

paid no direct taxes, and had no right to vote. The effect of this

distinction was to exclude the whole labouring classes from the

franchise; and under the July Monarchy, while the real nation consisted

of some thirty millions, the legal nation (_pays legal_), the people

legally possessed of political rights, amounted to no more than 200,000,

whom the Government found it only too easy to manage and corrupt. The

revolution of 1848 was simply a revolt against this injustice. It was a

revolt of the fourth estate against the privileges of the third, as the

first revolution was a revolt of the third against the privileges of the

other two. Nor were the privileges which the _bourgeoisie_ had contrived

to acquire confined to political rights alone; they included also fiscal

exemptions. According to the latest statistical returns, it appeared

that five-sixths of the revenue of Prussia came from indirect taxation,

and indirect taxes were always taken disproportionately out of the

pockets of the working class. A man might be twenty times richer than

another, but he did not therefore consume twenty times the amount of

bread, salt, or beer. Taxation ought to be in ratio of means, and

indirect taxation--so much favoured by the _bourgeoisie_--was simply an

expedient for saving the rich at the expense of the poor.

Now, the revolution of 1848 was a fight for the emancipation of the

working class from this unequal distribution of political rights and

burdens. The working class was really not a class at all, but was the

nation; and the aim of the State should be their amelioration. "What is

the State?" asks Lassalle. "You are the State," he replies. "You are

ninety-six per cent. of the population. All political power ought to be

of you, and through you, and for you; and your good and amelioration

ought to be the aim of the State. It ought to be so, because your good

is not a class interest, but is the national interest." The fourth

estate differs from the feudal interest, and differs from the

_bourgeoisie_, not merely in that it is not a privileged class, but in

that it cannot possibly become one. It cannot degenerate, as the

_bourgeoisie_ had done, into a privileged and exclusive caste; because,

consisting as it does of the great body of the people, its class

interest and the common good are identical, or at least harmonious.

"Your affair is the affair of mankind; your personal interest moves and

beats with the pulse of history, with the living principle of moral

development."

Such then is the idea of the working class, which is, or is destined to

be, the ruling principle of society in the present era of the world. Its

supremacy will have important consequences, both ethical and political.

Ethically, the working class is less selfish than the classes above it,

simply because it has no exclusive privileges to maintain. The necessity

of maintaining privileges always develops an assertion of personal

interest in exact proportion to the amount of privilege to be defended,

and that is why the selfishness of a class constantly exceeds the

individual selfishness of the members that compose it. Now under the

happier _regime_ of the idea of labour, there would be no exclusive

interests or privileges, and therefore less selfishness. Adam would

delve and Eve would spin, and, consciously or unconsciously, each would

work more for the whole, and the whole would work more for each.

Politically, too, the change would be remarkable and beneficial. The

working class has a quite different idea of the State and its aim from

the _bourgeoisie_. The latter see no other use in the State but to

protect personal freedom and property. The State is a mere

night-watchman, and, if there were no thieves and robbers, would be a

superfluity; its occupation would be gone. Its whole duty is exhausted

when it guarantees to every individual the unimpeded exercise of his

activity as far as consistent with the like right of his neighbours.

Even from its own point of view this _bourgeois_ theory of the State

fails to effect its purpose. Instead of securing equality of freedom, it

only secures equality of right to freedom. If all men were equal in

fact, this might answer well enough, but since they are not, the result

is simply to place the weak at the mercy of the powerful. Now the

working class have an entirely different view of the State's mission

from this. They say the protection of an equality of right to freedom is

an insufficient aim for the State in a morally ordered community. It

ought to be supplemented by the securing of solidarity of interests and

community and reciprocity of development. History all along is an

incessant struggle with Nature, a victory over misery, ignorance,

poverty, powerlessness--_i.e._, over unfreedom, thraldom, restrictions

of all kinds. The perpetual conquest over these restrictions is the

development of freedom, is the growth of culture. Now this is never

effected by each man for himself. It is the function of the State to do

it. The State is the union of individuals into a moral whole which

multiplies a millionfold the aggregate of the powers of each. The end

and function of the State is not merely to guard freedom, but to develop

it; to put the individuals who compose it in a position to attain and

maintain such objects, such levels of existence, such stages of culture,

power, and freedom, as they would have been incapable of reaching by

their own individual efforts alone. The State is the great agency for

guiding and training the human race to positive and progressive

development; in other words, for bringing human destiny (_i.e._, the

culture of which man as man is susceptible) to real shape and form in

actual existence. Not freedom, but development is now the keynote. The

State must take a positive part, proportioned to its immense capacity,

in the great work which, as he has said, constitutes history, and must

forward man's progressive conquest over misery, ignorance, poverty, and

restrictions of every sort. This is the purpose, the essence, the moral

nature of the State, which she can never entirely abrogate, without

ceasing to be, and which she has indeed always been obliged, by the very

force of things, more or less to fulfil, often without her conscious

consent, and sometimes in spite of the opposition of her leaders. In a

word, the State must, by the union of all, help each to his full

development. This was the earnest and noble idea of 1848. It is the idea

of the new age, the age of labour, and it cannot fail to have a most

important and beneficial bearing on the course of politics and

legislation whenever it is permitted to have free operation in that

sphere by means of universal and direct suffrage.

This exposition of Lassalle's teaching in his "Working Men's Programme"

already furnishes us with the transition to his economic views. Every

age of the world, he held, has its own ruling idea. The idea of the

working class is the ruling idea of the new epoch we have now entered

on, and that idea implies that every man is entitled to a

_menschenwuerdiges Dasein_, to an existence worthy of his moral destiny,

and that the State is bound to make this a governing consideration in

its legislative and executive work. Man's destiny is to progressive

civilization, and a condition of society which makes progressive

civilization the exclusive property of the few, and practically debars

the vast mass of the people from participation in it, stands in the

present age self-condemned. It no longer corresponds to its own idea.

Society has long since declared no man shall be enslaved; society has

more recently declared no man shall be ignorant; society now declares no

man shall be without property. He cannot be really free without property

any more than he can be really free without knowledge. He has been

released successively from a state of legal dependence and from a state

of intellectual dependence; he must now be released from a state of

economic dependence. This is his final emancipation, which is necessary

to enable him to reap any fruits from the other two, and it cannot take

place without a complete transformation of present industrial

arrangements. It is a common mistake, he said, to think that socialists

take their stand on equality. They really take their stand on freedom.

They argue that the positive side of freedom is development, and if

every man has a right to freedom, then every man has a right to the

possibility of development. From this right, however, they allege the

existing industrial system absolutely excludes the great majority. The

freeman cannot realize his freedom, the individual cannot realize his

individuality, without a certain external economic basis of work and

enjoyment, and the best way to furnish him with this is to clothe him in

various ways with collective property.

Lassalle's argument, however, is still more specific than this. In the

beginning of his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze," he quotes a passage from his

previous work on "The System of Acquired Rights," which he informs us he

had intended to expand into a systematic treatise on "The Principles of

Scientific National Economy." This intention he was actually preparing

to fulfil when the Leipzig invitation and letter diverted him at once

into practical agitation. He regrets that circumstances had thus not

permitted the practical agitation to be preceded by the theoretical

codex which should be the basis for it, but adds that the substance of

his theory is contained in this polemic against Schultze-Delitzsch,

though the form of its exposition is considerably modified by his plan

of following the ideas of Schultze's "Working Men's Catechism," and by

his purpose of answering Schultze's misplaced taunt of "half knowledge"

by trying to extinguish the economic pretensions of the latter as

completely as he had done the literary pretensions of Julian Schmidt.

"Every line I write," says Lassalle, with a characteristic finality of

self-confidence, "I write armed with the whole culture of my century";

and at any rate Schultze-Delitzsch was far his inferior in economic as

in other knowledge. In the passage to which I have referred, Lassalle

says, "The world is now face to face with a new social question, the

question whether, since there is no longer any property in the immediate

use of another man, there should still exist property in his mediate

exploitation--_i.e._, whether the free realization and development of

one's power and labour should be the exclusive private property of the

owner of the instruments and advances necessary for labour--_i.e._, of

capital; and whether the employer as such, and apart from the

remuneration of his own intellectual labour of management, should be

permitted to have property in the value of other people's

labour--_i.e._, whether he ought to receive what is known as the

premium or profit of capital, consisting of the difference between the

selling price of the product and the sum of the wages and salaries of

all kinds of labour, manual and mental, that have contributed to its

production."

His standing-point here, again, as always, belongs to the philosophy of

history--to the idea of historical evolution with which his Hegelianism

had early penetrated him. The course of legal history has been one of

gradual but steady contraction of the sphere of private property in the

interests of personal freedom and development. The ancient system of

slavery, under which the labourer was the absolute and complete property

of his master, was followed by the feudal system of servitudes, under

which he was still only partially proprietor of himself, but was bound

by law to a particular lord by one or more of a most manifold series of

specific services. These systems have been successively abolished. There

is no longer property in man or in the use of man. No man can now be

either inherited or sold in whole or in part. He is his own, and his

power of labour is his own. But he is still far from being in full

possession of himself or of his labour. He cannot work without materials

to work on and instruments to work with, and for these the modern

labourer is more dependent than ever labourer was before on the private

owners in whose hands they have accumulated. And the consequence is that

under existing industrial arrangements the modern labourer has no more

individual property in his labour than the ancient slave had. He is

obliged to part with the whole value of his labour, and content himself

with bare subsistence in return. It is in this sense that socialist

writers maintain property to be theft--not that subjectively the

proprietors are thieves, but that objectively, under the exigencies of a

system of competition, they cannot help offering workmen, and workmen

cannot help accepting, wages far under the true value of their labour.

Labour is the source of all wealth, for the value of anything--that

which makes it wealth--is, on the economists' own showing, only another

name for the amount of labour put into the making of it; and labour is

the only ground on which modern opponents of socialism--Thiers and

Bastiat, for example--think the right of individual property can be

established. Yet on the methods of distribution of wealth that now

exist, individual property is not founded on this its only justifiable

basis, and the aim of socialists is to emancipate the system of

distribution from the influence of certain unconscious forces which, as

they allege, at present disturb it, and to bring back individual

property for the first time to its natural and rightful

foundation--labour. Their aim is not to abolish private property, but to

purify it, by means of some systematic social regulation which shall

give each man a share more conformable with his personal merit and

contribution. Even if no question is raised about the past, it is plain

that labour is every day engaged in making more new property. Millions

of labouring men are, day after day, converting their own brain, muscle,

and sinew into useful commodities, into value, into wealth. Now, the

problem of the age, according to Lassalle, is this, whether this unmade

property of the future should not become genuine labour property, and

its value remain greatly more than at present in the hands that actually

produced it.

This, he holds, can only be done by a fundamental reconstruction of the

present industrial system, and by new methods of determining the

remuneration of the labouring class. For there is a profound

contradiction in the present system. It is unprecedentedly communistic

in production, and unprecedentedly individualistic in distribution. Now

there ought to be as real a joint participation in the product, as there

is already a joint participation in the work. Capital must become the

servant of labour instead of its master, profits must disappear,

industry must be conducted more on the mutual instead of the proprietary

principle, and the instruments of production be taken out of private

hands and turned into collective or even, it may be, national property.

In the old epoch, before 1789, industrial society was governed by the

principle of solidarity without freedom; in the period since 1789, by

freedom without solidarity, which has been even worse; in the epoch now

opening, the principle must be solidarity in freedom.

Partisans of the present system object to any social interference with

the distribution of wealth, but they forget how much--how entirely--that

distribution is even now effected by social methods. The present

arrangement of property, says Lassalle, is, in fact, nothing but an

anarchic and unjust socialism. How do you define socialism? he asks.

Socialism is a distribution of property by social channels. Now this is

the condition of things that exists to-day. There exists, under the

guise of individual production, a distribution of property by means of

purely objective movements of society. For there is a certain natural

solidarity in things as they are, only being under no rational control,

it operates as a wild natural force, as a kind of fate destroying all

rational freedom and all rational responsibility in economic affairs. In

a sense, there never was more solidarity than there is now; there never

was so much interdependence. Under the large system of production,

masses of workmen are simply so many component parts of a single great

machine driven by the judgment or recklessness of an individual

capitalist. With modern facilities of inter-communication, too, the

trade of the world is one and indivisible. A deficient cotton harvest in

America carries distress into thousands of households in Lyons, in

Elberfeld, in Manchester. A discovery of gold in Australia raises all

prices in Europe. A simple telegram stating that rape prospects are good

in Holland instantly deprives the oilworkers of Prussia of half their

wages. So far from there being any truth in the contention of

Schultze-Delitzsch, that the existing system is the only sound one,

because it is founded on the principle of making every man responsible

for his own doings, the very opposite is the case. The present system

makes every man responsible for what he does not do. In consequence of

the unprecedented interconnection of modern industry, the sum of

conditions needed to be known for its successful guidance have so

immensely increased that rational calculation is scarcely possible, and

men are enriched without any merit, and impoverished without any fault.

According to Lassalle, in the absence as yet of an adequate system of

commercial statistics, the number of known conditions is always much

smaller than the number of unknown, and the consequence is, that trade

is very much a game of chance. Everything in modern industrial economy

is ruled by social connections, by favourable or unfavourable situations

and opportunities. _Conjunctur_ is its great Orphic chain. Chance is its

Providence--Chance and his sole and equally blind counsellor,

Speculation. Every age and condition of society, says Lassalle, tends to

develop some phenomenon that more particularly expresses its type and

spirit, and the purest type of capitalistic society is the financial

speculator. Capital, he maintains, is a historical and not a logical

category, and the capitalist is a modern product. He is the development,

not of the ancient Croesus or the mediaeval lord, but of the usurer, who

has taken their place, but was in their lifetime hardly a respectable

person. Croesus was a very rich man, but he was not a capitalist, for he

could do anything with his wealth except capitalize it. The idea of

money making money and of capital being self-productive, which Lassalle

takes to be the governing idea of the present order of things, was, he

says, quite foreign to earlier periods. Industry is now entirely under

the control of capitalists speculating for profit. No one now makes

things first of all for his own use--as mythologizing economists

relate--and then exchanges what is over for the like redundant work of

his neighbours. Men make everything first of all, and last of all, for

other people's use, and they make it at the direction and expense of a

capitalist who is speculating for money, and, in the absence of

systematic statistics, is speculating in the dark. Chance and social

connections make him rich, chance and social connections bring him to

ruin. Capital is not the result of saving, it is the result of

_Conjunctur_; and so are the vicissitudes and crises that have so

immensely increased in modern times. What you have now, therefore, says

Lassalle, is a system of socialism; wealth is at present distributed by

social means, and by nothing else; and all he contends for is, as he

says, to substitute a regulated and rational socialism for this anarchic

and natural socialism that now exists.

His charge against the present system, however, is more than that it is

anarchic; he maintains it to be unjust--organically and hopelessly

unjust. The labourer's back is the green table on which the whole game

is played, and all losses are in the end sustained by him. A slightly

unfavourable turn of things sends him at once into want, while even a

considerably favourable one brings him no corresponding advantage, for,

according to all economists, wages are always the last thing to rise

with a reviving trade. The present system is, in fact, incapable of

doing the labourer justice, and would not suffer employers to do so even

if they wished. Injustice is bred in its very bone and blood. In this

contention Lassalle builds his whole argument on premises drawn from the

accepted economic authorities. Socialist economics, he says, is nothing

but a battle against Ricardo, whom he describes as the last and most

representative development of _bourgeois_ economics; and it fights the

battle with Ricardo's own weapons, and on Ricardo's own ground. There

are two principles in particular of which it makes much use--Ricardo's

law of value and Ricardo's law of natural or necessary wages.

Ricardo's law of value is that the value of a commodity, or the quantity

of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the

relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and

not on the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour.

Value is thus resolved into so much labour, or what is the same thing,

so much time consumed in labour, mental and manual, upon the commodity.

This reduction of value to quantity of time is reckoned by Lassalle the

one great merit of Ricardo and the English economists. Ricardo, however,

strictly limited his law to commodities that admitted of indefinite

multiplication, the value of other commodities being, he held, regulated

by their scarcity; and he confined it to the normal value of the

commodities only, the fluctuations of their market-price depending on

other considerations. But Lassalle seeks to make it cover these cases

also by means of a distinction he draws between individual time of

labour, and socially necessary time of labour. According to this

distinction, what constitutes the value of a product is not the time

actually taken or required by the person who made it; for he may have

been indolent or slow, or may not have used the means and appliances

which the age he lived in afforded him. What constitutes value is the

average time of labour socially necessary, the time required by labour

of average efficiency using the methods the age supplies. If the

commodity can be produced in an hour, an hour's work will be its value,

though you have taken ten to produce it by slower methods. So far there

is nothing very remarkable, but Lassalle goes on to argue that you may

waste your time not merely by using methods that society has superseded,

but by producing commodities that society no longer wants. You go on

making shoe-buckles after they have gone out of fashion, and you can get

nothing for them. They have no value. And why? Because, while they

indeed represent labour, they do not represent socially necessary

labour. So again with over-production: you may produce a greater amount

of a commodity than society requires at the time. The value of the

commodity falls. Why? Because while it has cost as much actual labour as

before, it has not cost so much socially necessary labour. In fact, the

labour it has taken has been socially unnecessary, for there was no

demand for the product. On the other hand--and we are entitled to make

this expansion of Lassalle's argument--take the case of

under-production, of deficient supply. Prices rise. What is usually

known as a scarcity value is conferred on commodities. But this scarcity

value Lassalle converts into a labour value; the commodity is produced

by the same individual labour, but the labour is more socially

necessary. In plain English, there is more demand for the product.

Lassalle's distinction is thus an ingenious invention for expressing

rarity value in terms of labour value. It has no theoretical importance,

but is of some practical service in the socialistic argument. That

argument is not that value is constituted by labour pure and simple, but

by labour modified by certain general conditions of society; only it

holds that these conditions--conditions of productivity, of rarity, of

demand--have been created by nobody in particular, that, therefore,

nobody in particular should profit by them, and that so far as the

problem of the distribution of value goes, the one factor in the

constitution of value which needs to be taken into account in settling

that problem, is labour. All value comes from labour, represents so much

time of labour, is, in fact, so much "labour-jelly," so much preserved

labour.

While one accepted economic law thus declares that all value is

conferred by the labourer, and is simply his sweat, brain, and sinew

incorporated in the product, another economic law declares that he gains

no advantage from the productivity of his own work, and that whatever

value he produces, he earns only the same wages--bare customary

subsistence. In that lies the alleged injustice of the present system.

Von Thuenen, the famous Feudalist landowner and economic

experimentalist, said, many years ago, that when the modern working

class once began to ask the question, What is natural wages? a

revolution might arise which would reduce Europe to barbarism. This is

the question Lassalle asked, and by which mainly he stirred up

socialism. The effect of the previous argument was to raise the

question, What is the labourer entitled to get? and to suggest the

answer, he is entitled to get everything. The next question is, What,

then, does the labourer actually get? and the answer is, that on the

economists' own showing, he gets just enough to keep soul and body

together, and on the present system can never get any more. Ricardo, in

common with other economists, had taught that the value of labour, like

the value of everything else, was determined by the cost of its

production, and that the cost of the production of labour meant the cost

of the labourer's subsistence according to the standard of living

customary among his class at the time. Wages might rise for a season

above this level, or fall for a season below it, but they always tended

to return to it again, and would not permanently settle anywhere else.

When they rose higher, the labouring class were encouraged by their

increased prosperity to marry, and eventually their numbers were thus

multiplied to such a degree that by the force of ordinary competition

the rate of wages was brought down again; when they fell lower,

marriages diminished and mortality increased among the working class,

and the result was such a reduction of their numbers as to raise the

rate of wages again to its old level. This is the economic law of

natural or necessary wages--"the iron and cruel law" which Lassalle

declared absolutely precluded the wage-labourers--_i.e._, 96 per cent.

of the population--from all possibility of ever improving their

condition or benefiting in the least from the growing productivity of

their own work. This law converted industrial freedom into an aggravated

slavery. The labourer was unmanned, taken out of a relationship which,

with all its faults, was still a human and personal one, put under an

impersonal and remorseless economic law, sent like a commodity to be

bought in the cheapest market, and there dispossessed by main force of

competition of the value of the property which his own hands had made.

_Das Eigenthum ist Fremdthum geworden._

It is no wonder that teaching like this should move the minds of working

men to an intolerable sense of despair and wrong. Nor was there any

possibility of hope except in a revolution. For the injustice complained

of lay in the essence of the existing economic system, and could not be

removed, except with the complete abolition of the system. The only

solution of the question, therefore, was a socialistic reconstruction

which should make the instruments of production collective property, and

subordinate capital to labour, but such a solution would of course be

the work of generations, and meanwhile, the easiest method of transition

from the old order of things to the new, lay in establishing productive

associations of working men on State credit. These would form the living

seed-corn of the new era. This was just Louis Blanc's scheme, with two

differences--viz., that the associations were to be formed gradually,

and that they were to be formed voluntarily. The State was not asked to

introduce a new organization of labour by force all at once, but merely

to lend capital at interest to one sound and likely association after

another, as they successively claimed its aid. This loan was not to be

gratuitous, as the French socialists used to demand in 1848, and since

there would be eventually only one association of the same trade in each

town, and since, besides, they would also establish a system of mutual

assurance against loss, trade by trade, the State, it was urged, would

really incur no risk. Lassalle, speaking of State help, said he did not

want a hand from the State, but only a little finger, and he actually

sought, in the first instance at least, no more than Mr. Gladstone gave

in the Irish Land Act. The scheme was mainly urged, of course, in the

interests of a sounder distribution of wealth; but Lassalle contended

that it would also increase production; and it is important to remember

that he says it would not otherwise be economically justifiable, because

"an increase of production is an indispensable condition of every

improvement of our social state." This increase would be effected by a

saving of cost, in abolishing local competition, doing away with

middle-men and private capitalists, and adapting production better to

needs. The business books of the association would form the basis of a

sound and trustworthy system of commercial statistics, so much required

for the purpose of avoiding over-production. The change would, he

thought, also introduce favourable alterations in consumption, and in

the direction of production; inasmuch as the taste of the working class

for the substantial and the beautiful, would more and more supplant the

taste of the _bourgeoisie_ for the cheap and nasty.

After the death of Lassalle, the movement he began departed somewhat

from the lines on which he launched it. 1st, His plan of replacing

capitalistic industry by productive associations of labourers, founded

on State credit, had always seemed a mockery, or, at least, a makeshift,

to many of the socialists of Germany. It would not destroy competition,

for one association would still of necessity compete with another; and

it would not secure to every man the right to the full product of his

labour, for the members of the stronger productive associations would be

able to exploit the members of the weaker as the ordinary result of

their inter-competition. In other words, Lassalle's plan would not in

their eyes realize the socialist claim, as that claim had been taught to

them by Marx. Their claim could only be realized by the conversion of

all industrial instruments into public property, and the systematic

conduct of all industry by the public authority; and why not aim

straight for that result, they asked, instead of first bringing in a

merely transitional period of productive associations, which would, on

Lassalle's own calculations, take two hundred years to create, and which

might not prove transitional to the socialist state after all? Rodbertus

even had gone against Lassalle on this point, because he wanted to see

individual property converted into national property, and thought

converting it first into joint stock property was really to prevent

rather than promote the main end he had in view.

Then, 2nd, Lassalle was a national, not an international socialist. He

held that every country should solve its own social question for itself,

and that the working-class movement was not, and should not be made,

cosmopolitan. He was even--as Prince Bismarck said in Parliament, when

taxed with having personal relations with him--patriotic. At least he

was an intense believer in Prussia; less, however, because he was a

Prussian than because Prussia was a strong State, and because he thought

that strong States alone could do the world's work in Germany or

elsewhere. By nationality in itself he set but little store; a

nationality had a right to separate existence if it could assert it, but

if it were weak and struggling, its only duty was to submit with

thankfulness to annexation by a stronger power. He wished his followers,

therefore, to keep aloof from the doings of other nations, and to

concentrate their whole exertions upon victory at the elections in their

own country and the gradual development of productive associations on

national loans. This restriction of the range of the movement had from

the first dissatisfied some of its adherents, especially a certain

active section who hated Prussia as much as Lassalle believed in her,

and after the influence of the International began to make itself felt

upon the agitation in Germany, this difference of opinion gathered

gradually to a head. In 1868 a motion was brought before the general

meeting of the League in favour of establishing relations with the

International and accepting its programme. The chief promoters of this

motion were the two present leaders of the Social Democratic party in

the Reichstag, Liebknecht and Bebel, and it was strongly opposed by the

president of the League, Dr. von Schweitzer, an advocate in Frankfort,

and a strong champion of Prussia, who was elected to the presidency in

1866, just at the time the extension of the suffrage gave a fresh

impetus to the movement, and whose energy and gifts of management

contributed greatly to the development of the organization. The motion

was carried by a substantial majority, but before next year Von

Schweitzer had succeeded in turning the tables on his opponents, and at

the general meeting in 1869, Liebknecht and Bebel were expelled from the

League, as traitors to the labourers' cause. After their expulsion they

called together in the same year a congress of working men at Eisenach,

which was attended mainly by delegates from Austria and South Germany,

and founded an independent organization on the principles of the

International, and under the name of the Social Democratic Labour Party

of Germany. The two organizations existed side by side till 1874, when a

union was effected between them at a general meeting at Gotha, and they

became henceforth the Socialist Labour Party. This was the burial of the

national socialism of Lassalle, for though in deference to his

followers, the new programme promised in the meantime to work within

national limits, it expressly recognised that the labourers' movement

was international, and that the great aim to be striven after was a

state of society in which every man should be obliged to share in the

general labour according to his powers, and have a right to receive from

the aggregate product of labour according to what was termed his

rational requirements. Some "orthodox Lassalleans," as they called

themselves, held aloof from this compromise, but they are too few to be

of any importance. They still remain apart from the main body of German

socialism, and live in such good odour with the Government, whether on

account of their unimportance or of their supposed loyalty, that they

were never molested by any application of the Socialist Laws which were

enforced for twelve years strenuously against all other socialists.

Among the causes which brought the others to so much unanimity was

undoubtedly the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, which was

viewed with universal aversion by socialists of every shade. On the

outbreak of the war, Schweitzer and the members of the original League

gave their sympathies warmly to the arms of their country, and the

Social Democratic party was nearly equally divided on the subject; but

after the foundation of the French Republic, they all with one consent

declared that the war ought now to cease, and the socialist deputies, no

matter which organization they belonged to, voted without exception

against granting supplies for its continuance. They were likewise

opposed to the recognition of the title of Emperor and to the

constitution of the Empire, and indeed as republicans they could not be

anything else. From a recollection mainly of these votes Prince Bismarck

considered the movement to be unpatriotic and hostile to the Empire, and

accordingly suppressed its propaganda in 1878, when its growth seemed

likely to prove a serious danger to an Empire whose stability was still

far from being assured by any experience of its advantages. The

socialists retorted upon this policy at their congress at Wyden,

Switzerland, in 1880, by striking out of their programme the limitation

of proceeding by legal means, on the ground that the action of the

Government having made legal means impracticable, no resource was left

but to meet force by force. They thus threw aside the last shred of the

practical policy of Lassalle, and stood out thenceforth as a party of

international revolution.

The movement could, however, hardly help becoming international; not, as

some allege, because this is a peculiarity of revolutionary parties; on

the contrary, other parties may also exhibit it. What, for example, was

the Holy Alliance but an international league of the monarchical and

aristocratic parties against the advance of popular rights? Nor is it a

peculiarity of the present time only. No doubt the increased

inter-communication and inter-dependence between countries now

facilitates its development. There are no longer nations in Europe, said

Heine, but only parties. But in reality it has always been nearly as

much so as now. Any party founded on a definite general principle or

interest may in any age become international, and even what may seem

unpatriotic. The Protestants of France in the 16th century sought help

from England, and the Jacobites of England in the 18th sought help from

France; just as the German socialists of 1870 sided with the French

after Sedan, and the French communists of 1871 preferred to see their

country occupied by the Germans rather than governed by the

"Versaillais." In all these cases the party principles were naturally

international, and the party bias overcame the patriotic.

Besides, the socialist is, almost by necessity of his position and

principles, predisposed to discourage and condemn patriotism. Others,

indeed, condemn it as well as he. Most of the great writers who revived

German literature towards the beginning of this century--Lessing,

Herder, Wieland, Goethe--have all disparaged it. They looked on it as a

narrow and obsolete virtue, useful enough perhaps in rude times, but a

hindrance to rational progress now; the modern virtue was humanity, the

idea of which had just freshly burst upon their age like a new power.

This consideration may no doubt to some extent weigh with socialists

also, for their whole thinking is leavened with the notion of humanity,

but their most immediate objection to patriotism is one of a practical

nature. Their complaint used always to be that the proletarian had no

country, because he was excluded from political rights. He was not a

citizen, and why should he have the feelings of one? But now he has got

political rights, and they still complain. He is in the country, they

say, but not yet of it. He is practically excluded from its

civilization, from all that makes the country worth living or fighting

for. He has no country, for he is denied a man's share in the life that

is going in any. Edmund Ludlow wrote over his door in exile--

"Every land is my fatherland,

For all lands are my Father's."

The modern socialist says, No land is my fatherland, for in none am I a

son. He believes himself to be equally neglected in all, and that is

precisely the severest strain that can try the patriotic sentiment. The

proletarian is taught that in every country he is a slave, and that

patriotism and religion only reconcile him to remaining so. Moreover, as

Rodbertus has remarked, the social question itself is, in a sense,

international because it is social.