an actions alone. But in this address of mine, I show
that the dominance of this principle of the bourgeoisie, against which
I am by the public prosecutor accused of inciting to hatred and
contempt, is but a stage of economic and ethical development, which is
the outcome of historical necessity, and that its nonexistence is an
utter impossibility and that it therefore has all the character of
natural necessity that belongs to the developmental progress of the
earth.

Do we hate Nature because we have to struggle with her? Because we
have to strive to guide her processes and improve her products?

But there is the further question: How has the public prosecutor
understood my pamphlet?

The fundamental idea of my address is that the dominance of the
bourgeoisie has in no wise been produced, consciously and by their own
motion, intentionally and in a responsible manner, by the propertied
class as persons or individuals. On the contrary, the bourgeois are
but the unconscious, choiceless, and therefore irresponsible products,
not the producers of the situation as it stands and as it has
developed under the guidance of quite other laws than the direction of
personal choice. Even their reluctance to surrender this their mastery
I refer back to the laws of human nature, whose character it is to
hold fast to whatever is and to account it necessary. But a doctrine
which goes the length of denying the propertied class all
responsibility for the existing state of things, which makes them a
product instead of the producers of this state of things--this
doctrine the public prosecutor construes to have incited to hatred and
contempt of these persons.

For, be it noted, we have here to do with persons and classes of
persons, under section 100, not with institutions established by the
State, as under section 101.

No workingman has got so faulty an understanding of my address as the
public prosecutor, and I leave it to him to say whether this is due to
his lack of understanding or to his lack of will to understand.

But, more than all this, I go on to show that the dominance of the
idea of the bourgeoisie is a great historic move in the liberation of
humanity; that it was a most potent moral cultural advance; that in
fact it was the historically indispensable prerequisite and
transitional stage through development out of which the idea of the
working class was to emerge.

I therefore must be said to reconcile the working class