propertied classes reduced to servitude under the working classes,
that I would invert history and make the landed gentry and the
manufacturers the servants of the workingmen.

But however widely we may differ in the use of language, however much
we may mutually be barbarians to one another, could such a
misapprehension, or anything approaching it, be at all possible?

I develop (page 32) my view, explicitly and in detail, to the effect
that this is precisely the characteristic mark of the fourth estate,
that its principle contains no ground of discrimination, whether in
point of fact or in point of law, such as could be erected into a
domineering prerogative and applied to reconstruct the institutions of
society to that end. The words I use are as follows (page 32):
"Laborers we all are, in so far as we are willing to make ourselves
useful to human society in any way whatever. This fourth estate, in
the recesses of whose heart there lies no germ of a new and further
development of privilege, is therefore a term coincident with the
human race. Its concerns are, therefore, in truth the concerns of
mankind as a whole; its freedom is the freedom of mankind itself; its
sovereignty is the sovereignty of all men." And I thereupon go on to
say: "Therefore, whoever appeals to the principle of the working class
as the dominant principle of society, in the sense in which I have
presented this idea,--his cry is not a cry designed to divide the
classes of society," etc. And while I, with all my heart and soul, am
making an appeal for the termination of all class rule and all class
antagonism, the public prosecutor charges me with inciting the
laborers to establish class rule over the propertied classes. I ask
again: How is such an astonishing misunderstanding to be explained?
Permit me once again, to quote the father against the son:

"The medium," says Schelling (Vol. I, p. 243, _Abhandlungen zur
Erlaeuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre_)--"The medium
whereby intellects understand one another is not the circumambient
atmosphere, but the joint and common freedom whose movements penetrate
to the innermost recesses of the soul. A human spirit not consciously
replete with freedom is excluded from all spiritual communion, not only
with others but even with himself. No wonder, therefore, that he
remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others, and wearies
himself in his pitiable solitude with empt