Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - Lassalle's Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany - tr. John Ehmann and Fred Bader (1879).djvu/22

 izing the expenditure of twenty million pounds sterling, ($100,000,000,) for that purpose. To free an unlimited majority of its own nation from the cruel law that governs wages in their country ought surely be expected to interest them still more than freeing a strange race in a strange land.

In this connection I would also point to the example of the United States, presenting with such unexampled liberality by subsidies of land to forward railroad enterprise.

The guarantee of the interest alluded to above, so forcibly reminding one of the phrase, "the lion's share," amounted to neither more nor less than this: Should the new enterprise prove unprofitable, the State must bear the loss; that is, you, the taxpayers, shall pay the deficit. If, on the other hand, the thing should be a success, the dividends, no matter how heavy, shall accrue to the rich stockholders. In some countries, particularly Prussia, this feature is sought to have a modified appearance given to it by reserving certain assumed advantages to be derived in the very far future; advantages which can only become such through the working-men associating for ameliorative purposes, and being felt as a factor in the politics of the nation.

Without the intervention on the part of the State—of which it may be said the guarantee of payment of the interest was the smallest feature—it is extremely likely we should have had no railoadsrailroads [sic] on this continent to-day. In any case, this fact is not to be disputed, that the Government, in guaranteeing the interest, was a reliable inducement to the rich property holders who control capital, to take hold. It was clearly a case of State assistance to the Bourgoise; and if extended to one class why not to another equally willing to honorably profiitprofit [sic] by it.

How was it that no cry arose against the interest guarantee as an improper intervention of the State? Why was it not declared that the guarantee of the State was not denounced as undue interference of self-help on the part of the rich stock companies? Above all, why was not the guarantee of the State stamped as Socialism and Communism? The question is readily answered: The intervention was in the interest of the rich, the property holding class of society, deference to whom has always been regarded as correct. It can only be when the intervention is sought to be in favor of the poverty-stricken that Communism is raised as a mad