Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - Lassalle's Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany - tr. John Ehmann and Fred Bader (1879).djvu/29

 sults of your labor. You are in no wise freed. Where is the gain to be seen? There is no gain—unless gain is to be seen in the added depravity which changes the workingman in the associated form into the worst form of master. The person engaged in the enterprise alone has changed, the system has undergone no alteration; labor, the source of all wealth, being confined to the old status of wages: barely sufficient to keep a man alive. It is easy, under certain conditions, for the understanding to become confused; as witness the creed under the influence of this law, making workingmen, on becoming stockholders, not employed in the factory, unwilling to recognize the fact that they are enjoying the advantages of the labor of others: opposed, even, to allowing them a share apart from the gain of their own labor, even to grudging them that upon which labor has a just claim.

Workingmen with means of labor and having a greed of enterprise! this is the disgusting caricature into which the stockholding laborer has been changed.

Finally, for a last, decided proof in this discussion:

You saw that in this factory of the pioneers, 500 workingmen were busied, and that 1,600 stockholders had an interest in it, This much will also be apparent to you, that unless we can succeed in mocking ourselves with the delusion of all laborers being rich, that the number of workingmen employed in a factory never will succeed, out of their own profits, to furnish the principal stock or capital necessary for a factory. They will find it impossible to resist the conclusion, that the admission of a greater number of stockholders, not employed in the factory, would be imperatively called for.

The proportion in this relation in the factory of the pioneers—1,600 stock holding workmen out of the factory, against 500 workingmen engaged in the factory—as three to one, is most favorable, and indeed rarely so: quite as small as could possibly be found to be; and is explained partly by the exceptionally comfortable condition of the organization, and partly through the fact that their peculiar branch of industry does not belong to those demanding a large amount of capital and also, because the factory does not belong to a mammoth, productive institution, in which case it would be very different, Finally, there is to be added, that, through the developement of industry itself, and the progress of civilization, this proportion must continue to increase every day. It must