Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/27

 minds which have no notion of the laws of history.

And it is for this reason equally foolish and childish to attempt to repress a revolution which has once developed itself in the womb of a community, and to oppose its moral recognition, or to utter against such a community, or the individuals who assist at its birth, the reproach that they are revolutionary. If the revolution has already found its way into the community, into its actual relations, then there is no help for it, it must come out and take its place in the constitution of the community.

How this comes about, and how far it had already happened in the period of which I am speaking, you will best see by one fact which I will relate to you.

I have already spoken to you of the division of labour, the development of which consists in separating all the processes of production, into a series of very simple and mechanical operations, requiring no exercise of reason.

Now as this division is ever advancing further and further, it is at last discovered that these single operations, as they are so simple and require no exercise of reason, can be just as well and even better performed by unreasoning agents; and accordingly in the year 1775, that is fourteen years before the French Revolution, Arkwright invented in England, the first machine, his famous spinning jenny.

I am not going to say that this machine produced the French Revolution. The invention preceded it by far too short a time for this, and besides had not yet been