Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - Lassalle's Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany - tr. John Ehmann and Fred Bader (1879).djvu/5



—You request me to give you my opinion of the workingmen's movement, and of the means best calculated to better the condition of the working classes, whether by political or moral action; and also to give you my views on the importance of the labor organizations of that portion of the people wholly without means; a duty I hasten to discharge.

In the first place, I beg to state that, my time being taken up by necessary labor, my reply must be brief.

In Berlin, October last, when the first consultation took place regarding the Workingmen's Congress, two opposite views appeared, the discussion of which, through the newspapers, elicited much interest.

One party insisted that you had no business to trouble yourselves about political movements, politics having no recognition of you as a factor in the national programme, your inferiority as a class giving you no importance or interest, in the debate. The other side insisted. as strenuously that you should array yourselves as a wing of the Prussian Progressive Party—to act the part of the chorus in its active drama, or as