many
respects, the capitalist class asserts the supremacy of its special
privilege with even stricter consistency than the nobility of the
Middle Ages did with its land ownership. The instruction of the
people--I mean here of the adult people--was in the Middle Ages the
work of the clergy. Since then the newspapers have assumed this
function; but through the securities a newspaper must give, and still
more through the stamp tax which is laid in our country, as in France
and elsewhere, on newspapers, a daily newspaper has become a very
expensive institution, which cannot be established without very
considerable capital, with the result that, for this very reason, even
the opportunity to mold public opinion, instruct it, and guide it has
become the privilege of the capitalist class.

Were this not the case, you would have much different and very much
better papers. It is interesting to see how early this attempt of the
_bourgeoisie_ to make the press a privilege of capital appears, and in
what frank and undisguised form. On July 24, 1789, a few days after
the capture of the Bastille, during the first days after the middle
class obtained political supremacy, the representatives of the city of
Paris passed a resolution by which they declared printers responsible
if they published pamphlets or sheets by writers _sans existence
connue_ (without visible means of support). The newly won freedom of
the press, then, was to exist only for writers who had visible means
of support. Property thus appears as the condition of the freedom
of the press, indeed of the morality of the writer. The
straightforwardness of the first days of citizen sovereignty only
expresses in a childishly frank manner what is today artfully obtained
by bonding and stamp taxes. With these main characteristic facts
corresponding to our consideration of the Middle Ages we shall have to
be satisfied here.

What we have seen so far are two historical periods, each of which
stands for the controlling idea of a distinct class, which impresses
its own principle upon all institutions of the time.

First, the idea of the nobility, or land ownership, which forms the
controlling principle of the Middle Ages, and permeates all the
institutions of that time.

This period closed with the French Revolution; though, of course,
especially in Germany, where this revolution came about, not through
the people, but in much slower and more complete reforms introduced by
the