ument. During the two and a half
years which followed the publication of this address, Lassalle often
set forth his fundamental social philosophy with extraordinary
clearness and force, but he never surpassed his opening salutation to
the workingmen of Germany. It has been read by hundreds of thousands.
It was his masterpiece.

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

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