Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/34

 dispose of large private property, of a large capital, and by reason of such a basis of capital, engage in production, or draw an income in the shape of rents. These may be called the rich citizens. But a rich citizen, gentlemen, is for that reason essentially no Bourgeois at all.

If a nobleman seated in his room, finds pleasure in the contemplation of his ancestors, and of his landed property, no citizen has any thing to say against it. But if this nobleman desires to make his ancestry or his landed property the condition of a special rank and privilege in the State, the condition of the power of directing the will of the State,—then the indignation of the citizen is roused against the noble, and he calls him a feudalist.

The same thing exactly takes place with regard to the difference of property within the citizen class.

That the rich citizen seated in his chamber should find pleasure in contemplating the great convenience and advantage which a large private property brings to its possessor, nothing is more simple, nothing more natural and legitimate than this.

The working man, and the poor citizen, in a word, the whole of that class which is without capital, is fully justified in demanding from the State that it should direct its aim and all its endeavours towards the improvement of the sorrowful and needy condition of the working classes, and to the discovery of the means by which it may help to raise those by whose hands all the riches with which our civilization delights to adorn itself have been produced. To the same hands all those products owe their existence, without which the whole community would perish in a single day; it is,