in his last
months Lassalle showed an unwise readiness seriously to compromise his
position for the sake of more immediate success. Had he lived, he
would soon have discovered that he must retrace those latest steps, or
Bismarck, and not he, would have been the actual leader of the first
German independent labor party. There was nothing in Lassalle's life
to warrant the assumption that he would deliberately sell his party
for a mess of pottage. Lassalle had put his hand to the plow and it
was not in his nature to leave the furrow unturned.

Yet Lassalle's title to greatness must lie less in what he himself
achieved than in the achievements of others in his name. He founded a
political party; others have made that party great. But the most
signal service is the service of the founder, for to found a party is
to generate a living organism which will, in the fullness of time,
express the purposes and unite the energies of millions. So it has
been with the party of Lassalle. Like the husbandman who casts his
seed on good ground, he implanted the germs of the Social-Democracy in
the hearts of his country's workingmen when the time was ripe for the
sowing. It is enough to secure his fame that he had the vision to see
that the time was ripe and the strength to break the ground.

* * * * *

_FERDINAND LASSALLE_

THE WORKINGMEN'S PROGRAMME (1862)

TRANSLATED BY E.H. BABBITT, A.B.

Assistant Professor of German, Tufts College

Gentlemen: Requested to deliver an address before you, I have thought
it best to choose, and to treat in a strictly scientific way, a
subject, which, from its nature, must be particularly interesting to
you, namely, the special relation of the character of the historical
period in which we are living to the idea of a working class.

I have said that my treatment of the subject will be purely
scientific.

A true scientific attitude, however, is nothing more than perfect
clearness, and therefore the complete separation of our thinking from
any preconceived notion. For the sake of this complete absence of
preconceived notions with which we must approach the subject, it will
even be necessary, in the course of the discussion, to form a clear
conception of what we really mean by the term "workingmen" or "working
class." For even on this point we must not admit any preconceived
notion, as if these terms were something perfectly well
understood--which is by no