Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - Lassalle's Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany - tr. John Ehmann and Fred Bader (1879).djvu/8

 claim the leadership of the workingmen's party is a degradation, an illusion suggesting drunken impotence. Its surrender of manhood in the face of the contempt of the Government, puts aside all hopes of its leading in the direction of the liberty of the German people.

What has been said gives definitively the position to be assumed by the working classes in the matter of politics with reference to its relation to the Progressive Party.

The working-class must constitute itself an independent political party, based on universal equal suffrage: a sentiment to be inscribed on its banners, and forming the central principle of its action. The representation of the working class must be a fact in the legislative bodies of the nation. Nothing less will satisfy the awakened demands of the working classes.

We must open, for this end, a peaceful, lawful agitation. Let this be the programme of the party of labor, without reference to the Progressive Party. The workers must regard their organization as that of an independent party, utterly and completely separate and distinct from all political affiliation with the Progressivists; recognizing it only when their common interests bring them into copartnership at the polls,

This must be the policy of the Workingmen's Party. Whatever of leaning toward the Progressive Party will be made apparent, must be by the Progressivists coming up to their standard; giving them a chance either to develope, or to sink deeper in the mire of impotence—where it is already knee-deep. Such must be the tactics pursued by the Workingmen's Party toward the Progressive Party, So much for politics.

Now to the social question you have broached, and which interests you in a much greater degree.

I confess that it was with a grim smile I noticed that debates on free trade and free movement should form important features in the order of the projected Congress. Why you should seek to discuss free movement can best be answered by quoting Schiller's famous distich:

Free trade and free movement are matters which, in a law-making body, are quietly decreed without debating.

The German working men surely have no desire to repeat