Friedrich Wilhelm von Lassalle

“ But Lassalle was not content merely to criticise and condemn. His restless energy found no adequate expression short of the creation of a new party of his own. His repudiation of the Progressives, however, was not dictated by differences over tactics alone. He rejected the fundamental principles of the liberal movement in German politics. He saw around him the evidences of deep and widespread poverty. The great problem of the day to his mind was not the political problem of a proper constitution of government, but the social problem of a proper distribution of wealth. ”

“ At the time of the great constitutional struggle in the '60s there was no socialist party worth speaking of. In 1864, at the time Lassalle was killed in a duel with the Wallachian noble Rakowitz, the Universal German Working Men's Union numbered in all Germany 5,000 or 6,000 members on paper; in reality still fewer. ”

“ The father thinks how he has toiled for the son; the son thinks that if this toil were given for love, it should not be turned into a fetter and restraint. Young Lassalle, instead of becoming a clever silk-merchant, insisted on a university career, where he studied earnestly, and was admitted to the most cultured circles.
Though his birth was Jewish, he encountered little prejudice against his race. ”

“ Lassalle was undoubtedly a man of the most extraordinary endowments. The reader of his works feels that he is in the presence of a mind of a very high order. Both in his works and in his life we find an exceptional combination of gifts, philosophic power, eloquence, enthusiasm, practical energy, a dominating force of will. Born of a cosmopolitan race, which has produced so many men little trammelled by the conventionalism of the old European societies, he was to a remarkable degree original and free from social prejudice ”

“ The King wishes to see him, and he therefore drives to Charlottenburg. He is hale and hearty. I read much in Lassalle. Even the external appearance of so great and important a work excites reverence. On me it makes peculiar impression to witness the downfall, one by one, of the stays and rivets by which my inveterate opinions have been upheld. Every one who has grown old has to observe and experience such things; but in our times the changes are quicker and more powerful than in former times, and I am peculiarly sensible to them. ”

“ The agitation was growing rapidly, but he had achieved little substantial success when a most unworthy death closed his career.
While posing as the messiah of the poor, Lassalle was a man of decidedly fashionable and luxurious habits. His suppers were well known as among the most exquisite in Berlin. It was the most piquant feature of his life that he, one of the gilded youth, a connoisseur in wines, and a learned man to boot, had become agitator and the champion of the working man. ”

“ In Germany happily it is strongly opposed by the ancient learning which has once for all become the indestructible foundation of German thought. From this proceeds the view "that it is necessary to enlarge the notion of the State to the fullest extent to which in my opinion it is possible to enlarge it, that the State should be the organisation, in which the whole virtue of man should realise itself." ”

“ German Social Democracy.―Ferd. Lassalle, son of a rich Jewish merchant of Breslau, after a full course of study in philosophy and law, began in 1848 to take a lively part in the advanced movements of the age, and when he found among the liberal citizens no favour for his socialistic ideas turned exclusively to the working classes. In answer to the question as to what was to be done, by the central committee of a working-men’s congress at Leipzig, he wrought out in 1863 with great subtlety in an open letter the fundamental idea of his universal redemption. ”

“ He was the first great warrior of socialism. It is no reflection upon Marx to indicate that the present need of the Social Democracy is for warriors rather than for prophets.
Lassalle was one of the great figures of modern German history. Bismarck's judgment of men was of the keenest and his opinion of Lassalle, expressed in a speech before the Reichstag (September 16, 1878) is well known: "In private life Lassalle possessed an extraordinary attraction for me, being one of the most brilliant and most agreeable men I have ever met, and ambitious in the biggest sense of the term." ”

“ This bias, in combination with the philosophic lucidity due to the influence of Hegel and Feuerbach, is perhaps most remarkably observable in an author whose writings are, undeservedly, beginning to be somewhat neglected nowadays, an author who, dying at the early age of thirty-one, did not live to see the Revolution of March. This is Friedrich von Sallet, a young German officer of extraordinary strength of character, whose solid, comprehensive culture was due to his own unaided efforts. In him the profound thought of his age is united with its extreme, passionate Liberalism. ”

“ With the weapon in his hand that he himself has forged, the worker is put in a position where the political destiny of the state is directly dependent upon him. Those who exploited and scorned him in normal times, flatter him now and toady to him. At the same time he comes into intimate contact with the cannon, which Lassalle calls one of the most important ingredients of all constitutions. ”

“ To these political conceptions Lassalle is true throughout. It certainly is a nobler and more rational ideal of the State than the once prevalent Manchester theory. When we descend from theory to practice all obviously depends on what kind of State we have got, and on the circumstances and conditions under which it is called upon to act. ”

“ The historical antecedents and geographical position of Germany are such that it must long continue to be a military State; and most other nations have hindrances of their own. Reformers must therefore wait long and strive earnestly before they can hope to see such an ideal as that of Lassalle realised. That the ideal was a noble one, and that the gratitude of all lovers of progress is due to him for his energetic and eloquent advocacy of it, notwithstanding certain unworthy passages in his career, few will deny. ”

“ Such was in substance the view of all the German socialists of the last half of the 19th century. Even Rodbertus had advanced a claim of right on behalf of working men to the full produce of their labour, but thought the times not ripe for socialism. The others made no such reservations. Lassalle planned a centralized organization of workmen led by a dictator, and called on the government of Prussia to establish from the public funds co-operative associations such as his opponent Schulze-Delitzsch had hoped to plant by self help. His socialism was rather national than universal. ”

“ In 1867 he was elected a member of the North German Reichstag, but in opposition to Lassalle’s followers he refused all compromise with the “capitalists,” and avowedly used his position merely for purposes of agitation whilst taking every opportunity for making the parliament ridiculous. ”

“ LAZARUS, MORITZ (1824-1903) , German philosopher, was born on the 15th of September 1824 at Filehne, Posen. The son of a rabbinical scholar, he was educated in Hebrew literature and history, and subsequently in law and philosophy at the university of Berlin. From 1860 to 1866 he was professor in the university of Berne, and subsequently returned to Berlin as professor of philosophy in the kriegsakademie (1868) and later in the university of Berlin (1873) . ”

“ He advocated the establishment of productive associations wherein labor might perform the double function of workman and capitalist. In order that these productive associations might be started, the state should advance funds. After the productive associations have secured momentum they will continue by virtue of their own strength. Ultimately, industry will be conducted234 exclusively through productive associations; both industrial and social democracy will finally rule in political life. Lassalle became the founder of the Social Democratic party in Germany. ”

“ In early nineteenth-century England the young Disraeli could hopefully plan a different course, but Lassalle in Prussia could look for no public career as an aristocrat. Under the circumstances to be a democrat meant also to be a republican, and, if need be, a revolutionist. As a youth he drank deep from the idealistic springs that inspired the republican party throughout Germany. He admired Schiller and Fichte and, above all, Heine and Börne. Lassalle indeed had drunk deeper than most of the revolutionists of '48. He was not only a democrat and a republican; he was also a socialist. ”

“ Lassalle must therefore needs magnify his office of President, wave his arm with an air of vague malcontent millions. Was Bismarck taken in? Who shall say? In after-years, though he had in the meantime granted Universal Suffrage in Prussia, he told the Reichstag he was merely fascinated by this marvellous conversationalist, who delighted him for hours, without his being able to get a word in; by this grandiloquent Demagogue without a Demos, who plainly loved Germany, yet was uncertain whether the German Empire would be formed by a Hohenzollern dynasty or a Lassalle dynasty. ”

“ The boy carried this letter to the Countess; and Lassalle relates that, finding the lady in tears, he persuaded her to a full disclosure of the facts. He pledged himself to save her, and for nine years carried on the struggle, with ultimate victory, but with considerable loss of reputation. He first told the story to Mendelssohn and Oppenheim, two friends of great wealth, the latter a Judge of one of the superior courts in Prussia. They agreed to help him; for then, as always, Lassalle’s persuasive powers were irresistible. ”

“ Whenever a regiment is to remain more than one night on the same ground, the soldiers must be obliged to cut a small trench round their tents, to carry off the rain; but great care must be taken they do not throw the dirt up against the tents.
One officer of a company must every day visit the tents ”

“ By insisting on the right to universal suffrage the working classes have obtained a decided majority in the legislative assemblies, and there secured a government of the future in accordance with their needs. On these principles the Universal German Society of Working Men was constituted, with Lassalle as its president, which position he held till his death in a duel in 1864. Long internal disputes and personal recriminations led to a split at the Eisenach Congress in 1869. ”

“ Bismarck took no official notice. But it was not long before the Countess succeeded in bringing the two men together. The way had indeed been paved. If Lassalle's idealism had survived the experience of the Hatzfeldt law-suits, if he had yet to learn that the Fighter cannot pick his steps as cleanly and logically as the Thinker, those miry law-suits, waged unscrupulously on both sides, had prepared him to learn the lesson readily and to apply it unflinchingly. Without Force behind one, victory must be sought more circuitously. But to a man who represents no Force, how shall Bismarck listen? ”

“ To this we must add that the country was very prosperous; the revenue was constantly increasing; there was no distress. The socialist agitation which was just beginning was directed not against the Government but against society; Lassalle found more sympathy in Bismarck than he did with the Liberal leaders. He publicly exhorted his followers to support the Monarchy against these miserable Bourgeois, as he called the Liberals. Except on the one ground of the constitutional conflict, the country was well governed; there was no other interference with liberty of thought or action. ”

“ German socialism is—it is hardly too much to say—the creation of Ferdinand Lassalle. Of course there were socialists in Germany before Lassalle. There are socialists everywhere. A certain rudimentary socialism is always in latent circulation in what may be called the "natural heart" of society. ”

“ Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel. It is as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis of property itself. ”

“ He had a genuine interest in the welfare of the poorest; he thought he would find in them more gratitude and confidence than in the middle classes. We know that he was wrong; universal suffrage in Germany was to make possible the Social Democrats and Ultramontanes; it was to give the Parliamentary power into the hands of an opponent far more dangerous than the Liberals of the Prussian Assembly. Probably no one had more responsibility for this measure than the brilliant founder of the Socialist party. Bismarck had watched with interest the career of Lassalle ”

“ From the assize court of Düsseldorf, of all places, we have a very definite glimpse of a good-looking man, likely to be a favourite in the society of the opposite sex:—
“Ferdinand Lassalle,” runs the official document, “aged twenty-three, a civilian, born at Breslau, and dwelling recently at Berlin. Stands five feet six inches in height, has brown curly hair, open forehead, brown eyebrows, dark blue eyes, well proportioned nose and mouth, and rounded chin.” ”

“ We are not prepared to believe that all things that have succeeded were good, and all things that have failed were evil; or that things are good or evil only in so far as they succeed or fail. Still, we may well sum up the controversy between Lassalle and Schulze by stating that in 1885 the societies founded by the latter had in Germany a membership of 1,500,000 with a capital of £15,000,000, and at the election of 1890 the Social Democracy of Germany, originated by Lassalle, polled 1,427,000 votes. ”