Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - Lassalle's Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany - tr. John Ehmann and Fred Bader (1879).djvu/17

 part, that, with these common-places, they play the real question out of your hands, making it an entirely different one.

They mislead, they blind you.

Gentlemen, when you speak of the condition of the working class and how it is to be bettered, you mean the condition of your fellow-beings of the present time compared with the standard of life's necessities enjoyed by other classes at the same time.

They answer you by assuming comparisons of your conditions with that of workingmen in former centuries. But the real question is, Do you stand better to-day because the minimum of necessities has risen over that of the workingmen of eighty—two hundred—or three hundred years ago? If so, how can it effect you any more than when told the settled fact that your condition to-day is superior to that of the Botokudes and man-eating savages?

All human enjoyment and contentment depend upon the proportion of the means of satisfaction of the customary necessities of the wants of life of the period. Or, which is the same, the surplus of the means of satisfaction and contentment over the lowest line of life's wants, customary and necessary at the time. An increased minimum of life's wants will bring with it sorrows and hardships which a former period knew nothing about.

It is no hardship to the Botokude that he can buy no soap; neither is it a hardship to the nauseating savage that he does not sport a respectable coat. What possible uneasiness was it to the workingman, before the discovery of America, that there was no tobacco to be had? or, before the era of printing, that no desirable book could be got?

All human hardships and sorrows depend, then, only upon the proportion of the means of contentment to the, at the time, present wants and customs of life. We measure our sorrows and hardships, our contentment and blessings, by the conditions of other classes at the period. It is because, at different periods of progress, added wants have sprung into existence, bringing desires formerly unknown into demand, that sorrows and hardships appeared.

Human conditions have ever been the same: dancing about upon the lowest circle of what, in every period, is customary and necessary to a bare existence—sometimes a little above, sometimes a little below it.