Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/19

 Versailles before the Jew Samuel Bernard, the Rothschild of that day, in order to induce him to grant a loan.

When Law, the famous Scotch financier, had formed the trading company or joint-stock enterprise which had combined for the commercial exploration of the banks of the Mississippi, Louisiana, the East Indies, &c., the Regent of France himself was one of the Directors—a member of a company of merchants! Yes, the Regent found himself compelled in August 1717, to issue an edict, in which it was ordained that the nobles might enter the naval and military service of this trading company without any degradation to their dignity! To that pass, then, had the proud and war-like feudal nobility of France arrived, that they could become the armed commissaries of the industrial commercial undertakings of the Bourgeoisie who were carrying on their trade in every part of the world at once.

In connexion with this change of opinion, a kind of materialism had at that time already developed itself, and a voracious and greedy struggling for money and property, to which all moral ideas, nay what unhappily appeals in general still more strongly to the privileged classes, all class privileges, were prostituted. Under the same Regent of France, Count Horn, one of the most distinguished nobles connected with the first families of France, nay with the Regent himself, was broken on the wheel as a common highway robber; and the Duchess of Orleans, a German Princess, writes in a letter of the 29th November 1719, that six of the