Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/26

 of industry, had imperceptibly wrought in the structure of the community before the end of that century.

Although the actors in the Peasants War had not yet ventured so much as to take up any other idea than that of founding the State on the possession of land, although they had not been able even in thought to free themselves from the view that the possession of land was necessarily the element that involved dominion over the State, and a participation in this possession the condition of a participation in this dominion, yet before the end of this century, the quiet, unnoticed, revolutionary advance of industry had brought it to pass, that the possession of land had been completely stripped of its former importance, and in presence of the development of the new means of production, of the wealth which this development fostered and daily increased, and of the immense influence which it exercised thereby on the whole population, and on its relations, as well as upon the nobility itself, which had to a great extent become poor, had sunk to a subordinate position.

The revolution had therefore already entered into the vitals of the community, into their actual relations, long before it broke out in France, and it was only requisite to bring the change thus wrought to external recognition, in order to give it a moral sanction.

This, gentlemen, is always the case in all revolutions. A revolution can never be made; all that can ever be done is to add external moral recognition to a revolution which has already entered into the actual relations of a community, aud to carry it out accordingly.

To set about to make a revolution is the folly of