them the possibility of
actively engaging in production for the support of themselves and their
families; to this class, accordingly, belong the laborers, the lower
middle class, the artisans, and, in general, the peasants; second, those
who control a large amount of property and capital, and on that basis
engage in production or receive an income from it. These can be called
the capitalists; but no capitalist is a _bourgeois_ merely because of
his wealth.

No commoner has any objection to a nobleman's rejoicing privately over
his ancestry and his landed estates. But if the nobleman tries to make
these ancestors or these landed estates the condition of special
influence and privilege in the government, of control over public
policy, then the anger of the commoner rises against the nobleman and
he calls him a feudalist.

Conditions are the same with reference to the actual difference of
property within the class of commoners. If the capitalist rejoices in
private over the great convenience and advantage which a large estate
implies for the holder, nothing is more simple, more moral, and more
lawful.

To whatever extent the laborer and the poorer citizen--in a word, all
classes outside the capitalists--are entitled to demand from the State
that its whole thought and effort be directed toward improving the
lamentable and poverty-stricken material condition of the working
classes and toward assuring to them, through whose hands all the
wealth is produced of which our civilization boasts, to whose hands
all products owe their being, without whom society as a whole could
not exist another day, a more abundant and less uncertain revenue, and
thus the possibility of intellectual culture, and, in time, an
existence really worthy of a human being--however much, I say, the
working classes are entitled to demand this from the State and to
establish this as its true object, the workingmen must and will never
forget that all property once lawfully acquired is completely
inviolable and legitimate.

But if the capitalist, not satisfied with the actual advantages of
large property, tries to establish the possession of capital as a
condition for participation in the control of the State and in the
determination of public policy, then the capitalist becomes a
_bourgeois_, then he makes the fact of possession the legal condition
of political control, then he characterizes himself as a new
privileged class which attempts to put the c