Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - Lassalle's Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany - tr. John Ehmann and Fred Bader (1879).djvu/16

 mum of cheapness in many products, together with a lengthened period for increased demand for labor, disproportionally cheap products are taken up and regarded as customary necessities for a bare existence of the people.

Thus it is then that laborers and wages at all times dance upon the otuerouter [sic] circle of the conditions constituting a bare existence—sometimes a little above, sometimes a little below, but seldom if ever changing.

This outer circle may change at different periods through the conjunction of the above given circumstances; and it is by comparing different periods with each other that the condition of the working classes in the later century and generation seems to be superior to that of former centuries and generations; and the whole history on the minimum amount necessary for an existence has arisen.

Gentlemen, I was forced to make this small detour, distant though it may appear from my real object, because this trifling little benefit in course of centuries and generations is always the point upon which all who desire to throw dust into your eyes, after the manner of Bastiat, do so; which amounts to nothing but the hollowest declamation.

Remember my words. The time may arrive when the minimum amount necessary to sustain the laboring classes will, as compared with the amount of former generations, appear greater.

Whether it is really so that, in the flow of the centuries, the general condition of the working class has continuously been bettering, involves a very grave and entangling discussion, embracing much patient research: an amount of investigation, indeed, altogether too great for ordinary persons to take the trouble to master : necessitating endless inquiries about the prices of calico in one year as compared with others, and how much you now consume, with such-like common-place detail—items which can be found in any commercial compendium.

I shall not go into this investigation, but will confine myself to what is absolutely firm and also easily proven.

We will grant that the minimum amount thought necessary for an existence increases in the course of generations, and along with it comes a betterment of the condition of the working classes.

But you will be made to find, by a little effort on my