Contemporary Socialism Part 4

CHAPTER III.

FERDINAND La.s.sALLE.

German socialism is--it is hardly too much to say--the creation of Ferdinand La.s.salle. Of course there were socialists in Germany before La.s.salle. 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 ma.s.ses, 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 La.s.salle. 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 The Silesian weavers, superseded by machinery, and perishing for want of work, raised it as a wild inarticulate cry for bread, and dignified it with the sanction of tears and blood.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 La.s.salle 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 cla.s.s 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-cla.s.ses 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 circ.u.mstances 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 La.s.salle. 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 cla.s.ses with an apathy that almost disheartened La.s.salle; and that it is now zealously propagated by them as a cause, as an evangel, even after they have emigrated to America, where their circ.u.mstances are comparatively comfortable. The ideas it contains La.s.salle 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 pa.s.sing 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 La.s.salle 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 Herac.l.i.tus 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 La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle 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. La.s.salle 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 n.o.bler and the more vulgar type, beset with an importunate vanity and given to primitive l.u.s.ts; 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 La.s.salle, 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 La.s.salle 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 G.o.ds, 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 La.s.salle, then a youth of seventeen, Hegelianism became a pa.s.sion. 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.

La.s.salle 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 n.o.bles 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. La.s.salle, 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.

La.s.salle'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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 circ.u.mstances 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 _ca.s.sette_, 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. La.s.salle 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 _ca.s.sette_, containing the veritable deed, in her hotel, and gave it to the other. They and La.s.salle were all three successively tried for their part in this crime. Oppenheim, who actually stole the _ca.s.sette_, was acquitted; Mendelssohn, who only received it, was sent to prison; and La.s.salle, 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 _ca.s.sette_, however, was a transaction which his enemies never suffered to be forgotten.

The theft of the _ca.s.sette_ occurred in 1846; La.s.salle 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 a.s.sembly in 1848, and the gift of a Const.i.tution 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. La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle 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 pa.s.sive resistance policy of the Parliament. "Pa.s.sive 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 a.s.sembly, for the people's protection, declares ill-will; it would be unintelligible how the commonest logic should have allowed a legislative a.s.sembly 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 pet.i.tioned for his pardon, he wrote instantly and publicly disclaimed her letter.

All these trials had brought La.s.salle 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. La.s.salle 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 "Herac.l.i.tus" 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 La.s.salle. That may be said of all politicians. Compromise is of the essence of their work.

During the next few years La.s.salle'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 Const.i.tution, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt at the time. His "System of Acquired Rights" already contains the germs of his socialist views, and his pamphlet on the Const.i.tution, which appeared when the "new era"

ended and the era of Bismarck began, is written to disparage the Const.i.tutionalism of modern Liberals. A paper const.i.tution 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 n.o.bility 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 const.i.tution 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 Cla.s.s."

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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses 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 La.s.salle'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 cla.s.s, 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. La.s.salle 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 subst.i.tution of a.s.sociated 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 n.o.body called it socialism to do so. Why, then, should people cry socialism if the State did a similar service to the great working cla.s.s, who were, in fact, not a cla.s.s, but the State itself. 96 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sed 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. La.s.salle'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 La.s.salle was completely disenchanted, and wrote Countess Hatzfeldt from Switzerland, shortly before his death, that he was continuing President of the a.s.sociation 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 cla.s.ses, 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, La.s.salle went to Switzerland ostensibly for the Righi whey cure, but really to make the acquaintance of Herr von Donnigsen, 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 pa.s.sionate affection, and they seem to have been well fitted for each other. Helena von Donnigsen was a bright, keen-witted, eccentric, adventurous young woman of twenty-five, and so like La.s.salle, 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, La.s.salle's native town, many of the audience said, here was La.s.salle again as he was when a boy. Learning from a common friend in Berlin that La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle 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, La.s.salle 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. La.s.salle 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 const.i.tutional 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 pa.s.sively to write to La.s.salle, desiring him to consider the matter ended, and submitted equally pa.s.sively (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. La.s.salle 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 Donnigsens, forgetting that they were Protestants. All in vain. At last two of his friends waited by appointment on Herr von Donnigsen, 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 La.s.salle after all. La.s.salle, 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. La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle 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 a.s.sociation 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." La.s.salle was not dead, but only translated to a higher and surer leadership. A La.s.salle _cultus_ was inst.i.tuted, 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 La.s.salleans, down, at least, to the time of the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878.

La.s.salle's doctrines are mainly contained in his lecture on "The Present Age and the Idea of the Working Cla.s.s," which he delivered in 1862, and published in 1863, under the t.i.tle 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 emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sist in bringing to the birth a future with which society is already pregnant. Now, it is this midwife service that La.s.salle believed the working cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, had almost immediately become a privileged cla.s.s itself. At so early a period of the revolution as the 3rd of September, 1791, a distinction was introduced between active and pa.s.sive citizens. The active citizen was the citizen who paid direct taxes, and had therefore a right to vote; the pa.s.sive 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s. 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 emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s from this unequal distribution of political rights and burdens. The working cla.s.s was really not a cla.s.s at all, but was the nation; and the aim of the State should be their amelioration. "What is the State?" asks La.s.salle. "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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s is less selfish than the cla.s.ses above it, simply because it has no exclusive privileges to maintain. The necessity of maintaining privileges always develops an a.s.sertion of personal interest in exact proportion to the amount of privilege to be defended, and that is why the selfishness of a cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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, const.i.tutes 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 n.o.ble 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 La.s.salle'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 cla.s.s is the ruling idea of the new epoch we have now entered on, and that idea implies that every man is ent.i.tled to a _menschenwurdiges 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 ma.s.s of the people from partic.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ation, 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.

La.s.salle's argument, however, is still more specific than this. In the beginning of his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze," he quotes a pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstances 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 La.s.salle, 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 pa.s.sage to which I have referred, La.s.salle 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 acc.u.mulated. 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 compet.i.tion, 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 emanc.i.p.ate 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 La.s.salle, 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 cla.s.s. 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 partic.i.p.ation in the product, as there is already a joint partic.i.p.ation 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 La.s.salle, 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, ma.s.ses 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 La.s.salle, 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 La.s.salle, 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 La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle, 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 subst.i.tute 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 La.s.salle 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 quant.i.ty of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quant.i.ty 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 quant.i.ty of time is reckoned by La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle 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 const.i.tutes 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 const.i.tutes 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 La.s.salle 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 ent.i.tled to make this expansion of La.s.salle'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 La.s.salle 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.

La.s.salle'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 const.i.tuted 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 n.o.body in particular, that, therefore, n.o.body in particular should profit by them, and that so far as the problem of the distribution of value goes, the one factor in the const.i.tution 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