t of socialism,
not a prophet in the vulgar sense of a mere prognosticator, but in the
old Hebrew sense of an inspired voice crying in a wilderness of
unbelief. Lassalle was no prophet. His function was to reduce
principles to action, to engage the forces of the times in the spirit
of the times, and by combat with such weapons as lay to hand to urge
the cause forward. The word "agitator" might have been invented for
him. He was the first great warrior of socialism. It is no reflection
upon Marx to indicate that the present need of the Social Democracy is
for warriors rather than for prophets.

Lassalle was one of the great figures of modern German history.
Bismarck's judgment of men was of the keenest and his opinion of
Lassalle, expressed in a speech before the Reichstag (September 16,
1878) is well known: "In private life Lassalle possessed an
extraordinary attraction for me, being one of the most brilliant and
most agreeable men I have ever met, and ambitious in the biggest sense
of the term." The eminent classical historian, Boeckh, who knew
Lassalle well, compared him to Alcibiades. Heine, in a letter
introducing Lassalle to a friend, wrote: "I present to you a new
Mirabeau." There is much that is striking in either of these
parallels.

Thoughts of what might have been, had Lassalle's career in politics
not been brought to so melancholy an end, are likely to be idle. Helen
von Racowitza, the pathetic instrument of his fate, not unnaturally
indulged her fancy in such thoughts. Writing in her old age she
queries: "Would he, ... with his incomparable ambition and will, ever
have been able to adapt himself to the compact edifice of the German
empire? Assuredly it must always have seemed to him like a prison!" To
a woman wracked by remorse it may have been comforting to believe that
when the catastrophe occurred the work of the man she once had loved
was really completed. Doubtless indeed Lassalle himself had begun to
realize, short as was the period from the foundation of the
Workingmen's Association to the fatal duel with the Rumanian Yanko,
that he could not bring his enterprise to a head as quickly as he had
hoped. Doubtless he already saw that the establishment of an
independent labor party was not a matter of a single hard-fought
campaign, to be waged and won by the genius of any one great leader,
but a task requiring long and patient toil and the indefinite
postponement of the sweet joys of victory. Certainly