Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/35

 therefore the duty of the State to help these to a more ample and assured wage, and so again to the possibility of a rational education, and through this to an existence truly worthy of man. Fully as the working classes are justified in demanding this from the State, and in pointing out this as its true aim, so on the other hand, the working man must and will never forget that the right to all property once lawfully earned is thoroughly legitimate and unassailable.

But if the rich citizen, not contented with the actual advantages of large possessions, desires to make the property of the citizen, or his capital, the condition of power over the State, and of participating in the direction of the will of the State and the determination of its aims, then the rich citizen becomes a bourgeois, then he makes the fact of possession a legal condition of political power, then he characterises himself as belonging to a new privileged class of the people, which now desires to impress the overruling stamp of its privilege on all the arrangements of society, just as the noble did in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, with the privilege of the possession of land.

The question then which we have to raise with regard to the French Revolution, and the period of history inaugurated by it, is this,—Has the third class which came into power through the French Revolution, regarded itself as a Bourgeoisie in this sense, and attempted successfully to subject the people to its privileged political domination?

The answer must be sought in the great facts of history, and this answer is distinctly in the affirmative.