Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - Lassalle's Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany - tr. John Ehmann and Fred Bader (1879).djvu/9

 the foolish spectacle of assemblages: whose chief enjoyment seems to be to applaud aimless, long speeches. Surely the earnest resolution of the worker will spare us the exhibition of all such pitiable weaknesses.

You want to found Savings-banks, Invalid and Sick-help Societies; institutions whose relative but subordinate importance I readily recognize. Let us, however, try to distinguish between two questions which have nothing to do with each other.

Is it merely your aim to ameliorate the condition of the worker? guarding him against the results of recklessness, sickness, age and accidents; the unguarded effects of which press individuals below the ordinary condition of their class. If so, the establishment of such institutions will be fully equal to meet your aims. A movement of such magnitude as the universal agitation of the workingmen of the nation, however, would be far from finding its reward in accomplishing so little when so much could be done, It would but suggest the old saying: "The mountain labored, and brought forth a mouse."

So limited and subordinate an aim might be quietly left to local associations, they being quite equal to the attainment of such desiderati.

The aim of this movement has a wider scope than establishing beneficiary institutions for the afflicted individual. It is rather to raise the status of the class in the nation, re-deeming it from the degradation of its present level.

Is not that the ultimate sought in this great movement? If so, then is the sharp. line of distinction called for which I have drawn between the merely beneficiary idea and the larger scope of national interferences with the present order of society. The two features must not be confused: The institution of the first is powerless to the attainment of the second; making it imperative that the former shall be regarded as altogether outside of and apart from effort to accomlishaccomplish [sic] the latter.

Allow me here to give you the testimony of a fellow workman, Prof. Huber, a man whose strictly conservative and royalistic tendencies would be likely to preclude from his writings any confessions in favor of the working-class proper; but whose candor and impartial judgment make him incapable of giving an unwarrantable complexion to truth. I delight