The "Open Reply Letter" did not thrill the world like a Lutheran
thesis, but it made the Progressists very angry. What! they had not
the People behind them! They were only exploiting, not representing
the People! And while the Court organs chuckled over this flank
attack on their bragging foes, the Liberal organs denounced Lassalle
as the catspaw of reaction. The whilom "friends of the working-man,"
in their haste to overturn Lassalle's position, tumbled into their own
pits. Schulze-Delitzsch himself, founder of co-operative working-men's
societies, denouncer of the middleman, now found himself--in the face
of Lassalle's uncompromising analysis--praising the Law of
Competition, while that Iron Law of Wages, their tendency to fall to
the minimum of subsistence (which was in the canon of all orthodox
economists), was denied the moment it was looked at resentfully from
the wage-earner's standpoint. Herculean labors now fell upon
Lassalle--a great speech of four hours at Frankfort-on-the-Main, the
founding of the General German Working-Men's Union, with himself as
dictator for five years, the delivery of inflammatory speeches in town
after town, the publishing of pamphlets against the Progressists,
attempts to capture Berlin for the cause, the successful fighting of
his own law-case. And amid all this, the writing of one of his most
wonderful and virulent books, at once deeply instructing and
passionately inflaming the German working-man.
And always the same sledge-hammer hitting at the same nail--Universal
Suffrage. Get that and you may get everything. Nourish no resentment
against the capitalists. They are the product of history as much as
your happier children will be. But on the other hand, no inertia, no
submission! Wake up! English or French working-men would follow me in
a trice. You are a pack of valets.
In such a whirl Helene von Dönniges was shot off from his mind as a
spinning-top throws off a straw.
But when, after a couple of months of colossal activity, incessant
correspondence, futile attempts to convert friends, quarrels with the
authorities, grapplings with the internal cabals of the Union itself,
he fled on his summer tour--where was the great new Party? He had
hoped to have five hundred thousand men at his back, but they had come
in by beggarly hundreds. There was even talk of an insurance bonus to
attract them. Lassalle had exaggerated both the magnetism of his
personality and the intelligence and discontent of the masses. His
masterful imagination had made the outer world a mere reflection of
his inner world. Even in those early days, when he was scarcely known,
and that favorably rather than otherwise, he had imagined himself the
pet aversion of the comfortable classes. Knowing the rôle he purposed
to play, his dramatic self-consciousness had reaped in anticipation
the rebel's reward. And now, though he was nearer detestation than
before, there was still no Party of revolt for him to lead. But he
worked on undaunted, Titanic, spending his money to subsidize
tottering democratic papers, using his summer journeyings to try to
attach not abilities in the countries he passed through, and his stay
at the waters to draw up a great speech, with which he toured on his
return. And now a new cry! The cowardly venal Press must be swept
away. "As true as you are here, hanging on my lips, eager and
transported, as true as my soul trembles with the purest enthusiasm in
pouring itself wholly into yours, so truly does the certainty
penetrate me that a day will come when we shall launch the thunderbolt
which will bury that Press in eternal night." He proposed that the
newspapers should therefore be deprived of their advertisement
columns. What wonder if they accused him of playing Bismarck's game!
And, indeed, there was not wanting direct mention of Bismarck in the
speech. He at least was a man, while the Progressists were old women.
The orator mocked their festive demonstrations. They were like the
Roman slaves who, during the Saturnalia, played at being free. To
spare themselves a real battle, the defeated were intoning among the
wines and the victuals a hymn of victory. "Let us lift up our arms and
pledge ourselves, if this Revolution should come about, whether in
this way or in that, to remember that the Progressists and members of
the National League to the last declared they wanted _no_ revolution!
Pledge yourselves to do this, raise your hands on high!" At the
Sonningen meeting in the great shooting-gallery, they not only raised
their hands, but their knives, against interrupting Progressists. The
Burgomaster, a Progressist, at the head of ten gendarmes armed with
bayonets, and policemen with drawn swords, dissolved the meeting.
Lassalle, half followed, half borne onward by six thousand cheering
men, strode to the telegraph office, and sent off a telegram to
Bismarck. His working-men's meeting had been dissolved by a
Progressist Burgomaster without any legal justification. "I ask for
the severest, promptest legal satisfaction."