Henry George and his followers, too, perhaps ought not in strictness to be classified among socialists. He would certainly repudiate such a classification himself, and the United Labour Party, which he founded in 1886 to promote his views by political action, expelled the socialists from membership in 1887. His actual practical proposal is nothing more than a narrow and illusory plan of taxation; but he puts it forward so expressly as the keystone of a new social system, as the remedy prescribed by economic science itself for the complete regeneration of society and the simultaneous removal of all existing social evils, that he is not improperly placed among Utopian socialists. Does he not promise us a new heaven and a new earth? And if he believes the State can call the new heaven and the new earth into being by a mere turn in the incidence of taxation, while most other contemporary socialists think the State must first pull down all that now is and reconstruct the whole on a new plan, is he, on account of this greater credulity of his, to be considered a more, and not rather a less, sober and rational speculator than they? He wants to abolish landlordism, while they want to abolish landlordism and all other capitalism besides; and his views may fairly be called partial or agrarian socialism. The United Labour Party was founded mainly to promote Mr. George's panacea of the single tax on such land values as arise from the growth of society apart from individual exertion; but it includes other articles in its programme—the municipalization of the supply of water, light, and heat; the nationalization of all money, note issue, post, telegraphs, railways, and savings banks; reduction of the hours of labour, prohibition of child labour, suppression of the competition of prison labour with honest labour; sanitary inspection of houses, factories, and mines; simplification of legal procedure; secret ballot; payment of election expenses. The United Labour Party is not strong. When Mr. George stood for the Mayoralty of New York, he had 68,000 votes to his opponent's 90,000; but he had on that occasion the assistance of the Socialistic Labour Party, who are said by Mr. Ely to number about 25,000 in New York, and who certainly constituted a very considerable element in the United Labour Party, for they were expelled at the Party Convention only by a vote of 94 to 54. On the other hand, Mr. Ely's estimate of the strength of the socialists is possibly too high, for they ran a candidate for the Mayoralty of New York themselves in 1888, a leading man of the party, one Jones, and he only secured 2,000 votes. However that may be, the United Labour Party was certainly much weakened by the loss of the socialists, and they were disabled entirely in the following year by a division on the question of Free Trade and the secession of Father McGlynn and the Protectionist members.
Nationalism is the name of a new movement, the fruit of the remarkable and very popular novel of Mr. Edward Bellamy, "Looking Backward," which may be said to be the latest description of Utopia as it now stands with all the most modern improvements. Mr. Bellamy would have all industry organized and conducted by the nation on the basis of a common obligation of work and a general guarantee of livelihood, all men to get exactly the same wages, and to do exactly the same quantity of work, due allowance being made for differences in severity, and the State to enlarge indefinitely its free public provision of the means of common enjoyment and culture. Mr. Bellamy's charming pictures of the new country naturally engendered a general wish to be there, and many little societies have been established to hasten the hour; but as the movement has not been more than a year in being, little account can yet be given of its success. The Nationalists have quite recently issued an organ, The New Nation, which announces its programme to be (1) the nationalization of post, telegraphs, telephone, railways and coal mines; (2) municipalization of gas and water supply, and the like; and (3) the equalization of educational opportunities as between rich and poor, and the promotion of all reforms tending towards humaner, more fraternal, and more equal conditions. Nationalism out of Utopia, therefore, means merely a little State-socialism.
The strongest socialist organizations in the United States are the Socialistic Labour Party, corresponding to the Social Democrats of Europe, and the International Working People's Association, corresponding to the anarchists; but both are composed almost exclusively of Germans. There are more Germans in the North American Republic than in any State of Germany except Prussia; and as many of them have fled from their own country for political reasons—to escape the conscription, or to escape prosecution for sedition—they bear no goodwill to the old system of government, and harbour revolutionary ideas almost from the nature of things. A socialist propaganda began among them so far back as 1848, when Weitling, of whom more will be said presently, published a socialist newspaper; and a Socialist Gymnastic Union was established in New York in 1850, which succeeded in forming a kind of federal alliance, apparently for socialistic purposes, with a number of other local German gymnastic societies throughout the States; but though these societies still exist, they seem to have dropped their socialism. It was taken up again, however, in 1869, by the International, which transferred its General Council to New York in 1872, held congresses from time to time in the country, and eventually, at the Newark Convention of 1877, adopted the name of the Socialistic Labour Party, with a programme formed after the Gotha lines. The numbers of the party were strengthened in the years immediately following by the arrival of German refugees, expelled from their own land by the Socialist Laws; but the new members brought with them elements of dissension which speedily came to a head after the arrival of the incendiary spirit, John Most, in 1882, and led, in 1883, to the entire separation of the Anarchists from the Social Democrats. The latter held a separate Congress at Baltimore in the latter year, attended by 16 delegates, representing 23 branches and 10,000 members, and it reported that altogether 38 branches adhered to them. The anarchists held a Congress at Pittsburg, and formed themselves into the International Working People's Association, with the following principles:—
"What we would achieve is therefore plainly and simply—
"1st. Destruction of the existing class rule by all means; i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action.
"2nd. Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative organization of production.
"3rd. Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery.
"4th. Organization of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes.
"5th. Equal rights for all without distinction of sex or race.
"6th. Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations resting on a federalistic basis." (Ely's "Labour Movement in America," p. 231.)
They differ from the Socialistic Labour Party, as this programme shows, in their exclusive devotion to revolution, and their opposition to all central government.
The Socialistic Labour Party has several newspapers, the principal being the Sozialist and the Neu Yorker Volkszeitung of New York, and the Tageblatt of Philadelphia; and the anarchists have more, the best known being Most's notorious Freiheit. Mr. Ely mentions sixteen socialist newspapers and ten sympathizing with socialism, and says that the majority of these support the anarchist side. The anarchists, moreover, have one journal in English—the Alarm; the Socialistic Labour Party started one in 1883, but it died. With that exception the press of both parties is entirely German, and neither party seems to have done almost anything in the way of an English propaganda from the platform. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling state that before they made their lecturing tour on the subject through the States in 1886, the American public had never heard socialism preached to them in their own tongue; yet books like Mr. Gronlund's "Co-operative Commonwealth," giving a very effective exposition of socialism, had already appeared from the American press. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling say, moreover, they met with more hostility to their mission from the anarchists than from any other source in America. The American people, while firmly stamping out the dynamite policy of the anarchists, have naturally nothing to say against an academic propaganda of any system of doctrine.
The trend of the labour movement in America seems away from socialism. That movement is in many respects more powerful there than in any European country. There are some five hundred labour newspapers in the United States, and an immense number of trade organizations of all kinds. Political power, moreover, both in the States and in the Union, is in the hands of the working class; and that class has now very nearly the same grievances there as it has in Europe, and the same aspirations after a better order of things. But their tendencies are not nearer socialism, but further from it. They simply cannot understand people who tell them they have no power to work out their own salvation under the system that is, and that nothing can be done, as Marx assures them, until every capital in Europe is ready for a simultaneous revolution with New York and Chicago. The trade unions accordingly ignore socialism. The Knights of Labour expressly repudiate it, and in the course of a very long programme they hardly make a demand which has a taint even of State-socialism. This "Noble Order of the Knights of Labour" is a general association of working men to promote the cause of labour, partly by their own efforts and partly through the Government. By their own efforts they are to promote co-operation till, if possible, it supersedes the present wages system entirely; equality of wages for men and women for equal work; a general eight hours day through a general strike; and a system of arbitration in trade quarrels. From the Union Legislature they want merely a few general reforms, none bearing directly on the situation of labour, except the abolition of foreign contract labour. The others are, reform of the currency, nationalization of telegraphs and railways, and the institution of banking facilities of various kinds in connection with the Post Office. From the State Legislatures they ask the reservation of public lands to actual settlers, the simplification of the administration of justice, factory legislation, graduated income tax, and the following provisions for labour: weekly payment of wages in money, mechanic's lien on the product of his labour for his wages, compulsory arbitration in trade disputes, prohibition of labour of children under fifteen. In 1886 they were 702,884 strong, but they have declined sorely since then. Their great weapon was to be an extension of strikes and boycotting beyond what was possible to single trades; but it was found that this policy was double-edged, and caused more hurt to some sections of the working class than any good it could do to others; and people lost faith in the principle of such huge miscellaneous organizations. Dr. Aveling contends that the Knights of Labour, in spite of Mr. Powderly's disclaimer, are really, though it may be unconsciously, socialists, because they want to supersede the wages system, if they can, by establishing co-operative institutions without State aid; and this, he holds, "is pure and unadulterated socialism." Indeed! then where is the man who is not a pure and unadulterated socialist? and what need for any mission to the States to preach the socialist message to the Americans for the first time in their own tongue?
England was the country last reached by the present wave of revolutionary socialism, although the system has been largely conceived upon a study of English circumstances, and is claimed to be peculiarly adapted to them. England is alternately the hope and the despair of Continental socialists. Every requisite of revolution is there, and yet the people will not rise. The yeomanry are gone. The land has come into the hands of a few. Industry is carried on by great centralized capital. The large system of production has almost finished its work. The mass of the people is a proletariat; they are thronged in large towns; every tenth person is a pauper; and the great mansions of the rich cast an evil shadow into the crowded dens of the wretched. "The English," says Eugène Dupont, a leading member of the old International, "possess all the materials necessary for the social revolution; but they lack the generalizing spirit and the revolutionary passion." Any proletariat movement in which the English proletariat takes no part, said Karl Marx, is "no better than a storm in a glass of water"; yet, though Marx himself resided in England for most of his life, no organized attempt was made to gain over the English proletariat to socialism till 1883—the year he died. There was before that, indeed, a small English section in a foreign socialist club in Soho; and, after the fall of the Paris Commune, hopes were for a time entertained of starting a serious socialist movement in our larger towns; but these hopes proved so delusive that Karl Marx said more than once to Mr. Hyndman, as we are told by the latter, that he despaired "of any great movement in England, unless in response to some violent impetus from without." But in 1883 a socialist movement seemed to break out spontaneously in England, the air hummed for a season with a multifarious social agitation, and we soon had a fairly complete equipment of socialist organizations—social democratic, anarchist, dilettante—which have ever since kept up a busy movement with newspapers, lectures, debates, speeches, and demonstrations in the streets.
In 1883 the Democratic Federation, which had been established two years before to promote measures of Radical reform, including, among other things, the nationalization of the land, adopted the socialistic principles of Karl Marx, and changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation. Its programme is long, and includes, besides the nationalization of land and all means of production, direct legislation by the people, direct election of all functionaries by adult suffrage, gratuitous justice, gratuitous, compulsory, and equal education, abolition of standing armies, Home Rule for Ireland, an eight hours day, State erection of workmen's dwellings, to be let at bare cost, progressive income tax, proportional representation, abolition of House of Lords, separation of Church and State, etc. Its principal founders were Mr. William Morris, an artist, a great poet, and a manufacturer exceptionally excellent in his arrangements with his workpeople; Mr. H. M. Hyndman, a journalist of standing and ability; Mr. J. Stuart Glennie, and Mr. Belfort Bax, both authors of repute; Dr. Aveling, a popular lecturer on science, and son-in-law of Karl Marx; Miss Helen Taylor, step-daughter of John Stuart Mill; and the Rev. Stewart Headlam. In January, 1884, they started a weekly newspaper, Justice, and a monthly magazine, To-Day, both of which still appear, and began the active work of lecturing and founding branches. But before the year was out, the old enemy of socialists, the spirit of division, entered among them, and Mr. Morris, with Dr. Aveling and Mr. Bax, seceded and set up an independent organization called the Socialist League, with a separate weekly organ, The Commonweal. The difference seems to have arisen out of the common socialist trouble about the propriety of mixing in current politics. The same disruptive tendency has persisted in the two parts, and in the end of 1890, Mr. William Morris seceded from the Socialist League with his local following at Hammersmith.
Neither of these revolutionary bodies has a complete organization like those of continental countries. They have never held a Congress, either national or provincial. They consist of a central committee in London, and detached local groups in the provinces, and their membership is not accurately known, but it is not extensive. It is in both cases declining, and it has always been variable, young men joining for a year or two, and then leaving. Their chief success has been among the miners of the North of England, and they have returned three members to the School Board of Newcastle. There is one socialist member in Parliament, Mr. Cunningham Graham, but he has not been returned on socialist principles or by a socialist vote; and hitherto the party has failed to obtain any serious support at the elections. At the election of 1885, Mr. John Burns, socialist candidate for Nottingham, had only 598 votes out of a total poll of 11,064, and Mr. J. Williams, the socialist candidate for Hampstead, had only 27 out of a total of 4,722. Mr. Burns, however, has since been returned to the London County Council, and will not improbably succeed in being returned to Parliament at next election. He is a working engineer, but is much the strongest leader English socialism has produced, an orator of great power, an excellent organizer, and the head and representative of a new labour movement which is likely to play a considerable part in the immediate future, and which is certainly fermented with a good measure of socialistic leaven. The New Unionism, as this movement is sometimes called, represents mainly the opinion of the new trade unions of unskilled labour—dockers and others—which have sprung into existence recently, and it was strong enough at the Trade Union Congress in 1890 to carry the day against the old unionism of the skilled trades by a considerable majority in favour of the compulsory and universal eight hours day. But, as Mr. T. Burt, M.P., the miners' parliamentary representative, said in his speech to the Eighty Club two months afterwards, the New Unionism is, after all, only the young and inexperienced unionism, and must needs run now through the same kind of errors which the older trade unions have gone through before, but will, like the older unions, learn, by discussion and experiment, to keep within the lines of practicable and beneficial action. However that may be, for the moment, at any rate, the fortunes of English socialism seem to lie with Mr. John Burns and his labour movement, and not with the two socialist organizations which appear to have already reached their height, and to be now on the decline.
A well-informed German writer lately warned us that anarchism had brought its headquarters to London, that it was coming into relations with the English population through its clubs and newspapers, and he ventured to prophesy that we should certainly have soon an anarchist fire to extinguish on our own hearth much more serious than Germany or Austria has had to encounter. So far, however, there is little to support such a prophecy. There are four small anarchist clubs in London—three of them German clubs, which live at strife with one another, and the fourth a Russian or Polish club, whose members have few or no dealings with the Germans. The German anarchists publish two weekly newspapers in German, which it is their great business to smuggle into the Fatherland, and the Russian or Polish anarchists publish one in Yedish—the German-Hebrew patois of the Polish Jews—which is printed for the entertainment of the Polish tailors of the East End. Some of the principal anarchist leaders, it is true, live amongst us—for example, Prince Krapotkin and Victor Dave—and under their influence a group of English anarchists has grown up during the last few years; but this group has already, after the manner of modern revolutionists, split on a point of doctrine into two opposite camps, which,—if we may judge from their respective organs, The Anarchist and Freedom—expend a considerable share of their destructive energies upon one another. The English anarchists have no permanent organization of any kind, and the one group are for socialist anarchism, and the other for individualist anarchism. On the whole the conversion of the English by the anarchist refugees is not an idea worthy of serious consideration; a better and more likely result would be that they would themselves, like Alexander Herzen, the leading anarchist of the past generation, be converted in England to more rational ideas of politics. Our safety lies, however, not so much in the practical character of our people, as in their habits of free and open discussion. What is called practicality is no safeguard against delusive ideas outside one's own immediate field of activity, and there is perhaps no country, except the still more practical country of America, where more favour is shown than here to fanaticism of any kind, if there seems to be heart in it. Besides, when we hear it said, We have indeed an enormous proletariat, but they are too practical to think of insurrection, we ought to reflect that, to the miserable, the practical test of a scheme will not be, Shall we be any the better for the change? but Shall we be any the worse for it? But under free institutions grievances always come to be ventilated; ventilation leads to more or less remedial measures, and discontent is removed altogether, or, at any rate, appeased for the time; and although under free institutions ill-considered schemes which inflate that discontent with delusive hopes may raise for a season a boom of earnest discussion, the discussion eventually kills them. So it seems to be with the fortunes of revolutionary socialism in England to-day. It has been much discussed for six years, but the height of the tide has been reached already, and the movement is now apparently on the ebb.
Besides these manifestations of revolutionary socialism, we have various societies representing an amateur and appreciative interest in socialism. There is the Christian Socialist Society, a small body of less than 150 adherents, including many clergymen and other members of the learned professions. They must not be confounded with the Christian Socialists of forty years ago, Maurice, Kingsley, and their allies, for the survivors of this earlier movement, such as Judge Thomas Hughes, Mr. Vansittart Neale, and Mr. J. M. Ludlow, do not belong to the present Christian Socialist Society, and would repudiate its principles. They wanted to promote co-operation without State interference, and they take a leading part in the co-operative movement still; but the Christian Socialist Society of the present day is all for State interference, and the articles of its organ, the Christian Socialist, strongly support the doctrines of Karl Marx, and declare that "the command, 'Thou shalt not steal,' if impartially applied, must absolutely prohibit the capitalist, as such, from deriving any revenue whatever from the labourer's toil." But with all their will to believe with the Marxists, the latter are not sure of them, and the socialist organs, Justice and To-Day, twit them one day for not being Christians, and the next for not being socialists. They are not men of the same mark as the earlier body of English Christian socialists, Canon Shuttleworth and Mr. Stewart Headlam being the two best known of them. The Guild of St. Matthew, which is composed to some extent of the same personnel as the Christian Socialist Society, has published a compendium of Christian socialism, and strives, among other branches of its activity, to cultivate good relations between socialists and the Church.
The Fabian Society, again, is a debating club of mixed socialism. It contains socialists of all feathers—revolutionary socialists and philosophical socialists, Christian socialists and un-Christian socialists—who meet together under its auspices and exchange their views, without having any recognised end beyond the discussion. They intervened lately, however, in the eight hours day controversy, and drafted a bill for a compulsory measure on the subject which attracted some public attention. Among the principal members are Mr. Sidney Webb, a well-known writer and lecturer on economic subjects, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, journalist, Mrs. Besant, and Mr. W. Clarke. They have published a volume of Fabian Essays, which has had a large sale.
No account of English socialism would be complete that made no mention of the writings of Mr. Ruskin, which have probably done more than any other single influence to imbue English minds with sentiments and principles of a socialistic character. But they have produced nothing in the nature of a school or party more than perhaps some detached local group; such, for example, as the Sheffield Socialists, a small body formed under Ruskinian inspiration, and the leadership of Mr. E. Carpenter.
The outburst of socialist agitation in England in 1883 and 1884 was immediately preceded by a revival of popular interest in an old and favourite subject of English speculation, the nationalization of the land. Mr. Henry George had published his "Progress and Poverty" in 1881, and in the same year the Democratic Federation was established in London with land nationalization for one of its principles, and Mr. A. R. Wallace, the eminent naturalist, founded the Land Nationalization Society. In 1882, Mr. Wallace contributed still further to awaken discussion of the question by publishing his work on "Land Nationalization," and the discussion was spread everywhere in 1883 by the appearance of a sixpenny edition of Mr. George's remarkable work. Land nationalization in the hands of Mr. Wallace has little in common with any form of contemporary socialism. He does not contemplate any interference with the present system of agricultural production; that is still to be conducted by capitalists and hired labourers, as it is now. He merely proposes to abolish what is called landlordism by the compulsory conversion of the present tenant farmers into a body of yeomanry or occupying owners, and his scheme differs from the more ordinary proposals for the creation of peasant proprietors merely in two points: 1st—which is a very good proposal—that he would leave part of the price of the property to be paid in the form of a permanent annual quitrent to the State; and 2nd—which is a more doubtful proposal—that this part should represent, as nearly as it is possible now to calculate it, the original value of the soil apart from improvements of any kind—or, in other words, the unearned part of the present value of the property—and that it should be subject to periodical revision, with a view to recovering from the holder any further unearned increments of value that may accrue to his holding from time to time. Mr. Wallace, like Mr. George, has very utopian expectations from his scheme; but he would honestly buy up the rights of the existing landlords, while Mr. George would merely confiscate them by exceptional taxation. This difference broke up the Land Nationalization Society in 1883, and the partisans of Mr. George's view seceded and formed themselves into the English Land Restoration League, which has established branches in most of the larger towns, and has now probably a more numerous membership than the original society. It is especially strong in Scotland, and ran three candidates for Glasgow at the last general election; but the three only got 2,222 votes between them, out of a total of 23,800 polled in the three divisions they contested. The ideas of the League have a certain vogue among the Highland crofters, where they blend very readily with the universal peasant doctrines that the earth is the Lord's, and that all other lords should be abolished.
In Scotland there are a good many branches of the two regular socialist organizations. The Scottish Emancipation League joined the Social Democratic Federation, and the Scottish Land and Labour League joined the Socialist League; but it is remarkable that there is no socialism in Ireland, except in a small branch of the Socialist League in Dublin, called the Dublin Socialist Club, although it seems a miracle for a country seething for centuries with political and economic discontent to escape such a visitation. Probably, as with the Poles, the minds of the discontented are already too much pre-occupied with other political and social solutions. The land nationalization views of Mr. George are, of course, spread widely through the influence of Mr. Michael Davitt in the agrarian movement of Ireland.
But while the recent wave of socialism has passed over discontented Ireland, and left it, like Gideon's fleece, quite dry, much more susceptibility has been shown by those parts of the Empire where the lot of labour is, perhaps in all the world, the happiest—the Australian colonies. Here, too, the susceptibility has been created to some extent by the land questions of the country. Mr. George, in his recent lecturing tour through these colonies, met with a warm welcome in almost all the towns he visited, made many converts to his ideas, and gave rise to a considerable agitation. In South Australia three of his disciples were returned to the Legislature in 1887, and their views are supported by several newspapers in Adelaide. In a new colony the argument for keeping the land in the hands of the State has in some respects more point and force than in an old. Mr. George's disciples in Sydney publish a paper called the Land Nationalizer, and his views are advocated by one of the most influential papers in the colony, the Bulletin of Sydney. In New Zealand a bill has actually been brought in for the purpose of nationalizing the land. But apart from Mr. George altogether, there is a flourishing Australian Socialist League in Sydney, established in 1887, and with a membership of 7,000 in 1888. It has a journal called the Radical, and keeps up a busy agitation with lectures and discussions. As a method of temporary policy it promotes associations of labourers for the purpose of undertaking Government and municipal contracts. In Melbourne, again, people are more advanced. They have no socialist organization, but they have an anarchist club, established in 1886 for the purpose of aiding social reform on the lines of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It circulates the works of Proudhon, Tucker, the Boston anarchist, Bakunin, and Mr. Auberon Herbert; and it publishes a newspaper called Honesty, which appeared at first once a month, and latterly once in two months. The ideas of the party are not easy to ascertain exactly from the pages of their journal. The State is, of course, the enemy, and land monopoly is one of the State's worst creations; but some of the writers advocate land nationalization, while others propound a scheme of what they call "constructive anarchy," under which every man is to own the land he occupies. They have started a new form of co-operative store, a kind of mutual production society, whose members bind themselves to produce for one another, and exchange their products for the bare cost of production; and they have started a co-operative home, in which the members get better and cheaper accommodation through their combination. Melbourne anarchism, however, has no harm in it: it is a mere spark of eccentric speculation. The working class of Melbourne is probably the most powerful and the best organized working class in the world. In their Trades Hall they have had for thirty years a workmen's chamber of their own creating like what German socialists are vainly asking from the State, and much more effective, because more independent. They have secured the eight hours day to fifty-two different trades without receiving a finger's help from the law, and without losing a shilling of wages. They have, moreover, the voting power in their own hands. In fact, they are, as nearly as any working class can be, in the precise condition socialists require for revolutionary action. They are entirely dependent on a handful of capitalists for their employment, and they have the whole power of the State substantially under their own control; so that they might, if they chose, march to the Parliament House with a red flag, and instal the socialist State to-morrow. But they do not choose. They propose no change in the present industrial system, and make surprisingly few demands of any sort upon the State. The world goes very well with them as it is, and they will not risk the comforts they really enjoy to try any sweeping and problematical solutions. While the socialist movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, seems settling into a practical labour movement, the labour movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, is steering furthest and clearest from socialism.
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 régime, 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 Cæsar 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 cafés 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 £1,000. 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 £1,000. 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 régime, 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. 96½ 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 Dönnigsen, 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 Dönnigsen 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 Dönnigsens, forgetting that they were Protestants. All in vain. At last two of his friends waited by appointment on Herr von Dönnigsen, 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 Sieyès 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 légal), 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 régime 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.