derstand what you mean by such productions," he cried,
excitedly waving a couple of pamphlets.

"That is not my fault, my dear Friedland," said Lassalle suavely. "It
takes _some_ brain to follow even what I have put so clearly. What
have you there?"

"The lecture to the artisans, for which you have to go to gaol for
four months," said the outraged ornament of Prague society, which he
illumined as well as adorned, having, in fact, the town's
gas-contract.

"Not so fast. There is my appeal yet before the _Kammergericht_. And
take care that you are not in gaol first; that pamphlet is either one
of the suppressed editions, or has been smuggled in from Zuerich, a
proof in itself of that negative concept of the State which the
pamphlet aims at destroying. Your State is a mere night-watchman--it
protects the citizen but it does nothing to form him. It keeps off
ideas, but it has none of its own. But the State, as friend Boeckh
puts it, should be the institution in which the whole virtue of
mankind realizes itself. It should sum up human experience and wisdom,
and fashion its members in accordance therewith. What is history but
the story of man's struggle with nature? And what is a State but the
socialization of this struggle, the stronger helping the weaker?"

"Nonsense! Why should we help the lower classes?"

"Pardon me," said Lassalle, "it is they who help us. We are the
weaker, they are the stronger. That is the point of the other pamphlet
you have there, explaining what is a Constitution."

"Don't try your legal quibbles on me."

"Legal quibbles! Why the very point of my pamphlet is to ignore verbal
definitions. A Constitution is what constitutes it, and the
working-class being nine-tenths of the population must be nine-tenths
of the German Constitution."

"Then it's true what they say, that you wish to lead a Revolution!"
exclaimed Friedland, raising his coarse glittering hands in horror.

"Follow a Revolution, you mean," said Lassalle. "Here again I do away
with mere words. Real Revolutions make themselves, and we only become
conscious of them. The introduction of machinery was a greater
Revolution than the French, which, since it did not express ideals
that were really present among the masses, was bound to be followed by
the old thing over again. Indeed, sometimes, as I showed in _Franz von
Sickingen_ (my drama of the sixteenth-century war of the Peasants), a
Revolution may even be reactionary, an attempt to