Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/30

 undertake one of them, so that for example, for hundreds of years the tailors who made clothes were engaged in lawsuits with the tailors who mended them, the makers of nails, with the locksmiths, in order to fix the limits which separated their trades. Now under such a system of Guilds how could production be carried on by machinery for which it was necessary that different kinds of labour should be combined in the hand of one and the same capitalist?

A stage had thus been reached, at which production itself, by its steadily advancing development, had brought into existence instruments of production which were destined to shatter the whole existing system of society; instruments of production and methods of production, which could find no place or room for development in that system.

In this sense I say that the first machine was already in itself a Revolution, for it bore in its cogs and wheels, little as this could be seen from its outward appearance, the germ of the whole of the new conditions of society, founded upon free competition, which were to be developed with the vigour and necessity of a living force.

And in the same way it is possible, gentlemen, unless I am greatly mistaken, that many phenomena which are to be seen at the present day, contain in themselves a new condition of things, which they must of necessity develope. This is entirely overlooked in judging of these phenomena from the outside only, so that even the Goverment passes over them without suspicion, while prosecuting insignificant agitators, nay even