Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/10

 words working man and working class, and we must therefore at the proper time get a clear understanding as to the sense in which we intend to use these words. This however is not the right time. We must on the contrary begin this lecture with another question.

Namely with the following question. The working class is only one of the many classes of which the community of citizens consists. Moreover working men have existed at all times. How is it then possible, and what meaning can be attached to the statement, that a special connexion exists between the idea of this specified single class, and the principle of the particular period of history in which we live?

In order to understand this, it is requisite, gentlemen, to throw a glance at history, at the past, which rightly understood, here as always, explains the present and foreshows the outline of the future. We must make this retrospect as brief, gentlemen, as possible, for we shall otherwise run a risk of not reaching at all in the short time allotted to us the real subject which we have met to consider. But even in the face of this danger, we must take some such retrospective view of the past, however cursory and confined to the most general features, in order to understand the meaning of our question and of our theme.

If then we go back to the Middle Ages, we find that even at that time the same grades and classes of the population were in existence, though certainly far less developed than those of which the community of citizens consists at the present day. But we find further that one grade and one element was at that time the dominating one—namely the landed interest.