Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/40

 at that time 153,800 working men or small citizens were of equal weight at the elections with 153,800 rich men, and consequently one man without property was of equal weight with one rich man, it is clear that now, when it takes seventeen poor men to counterbalance the vote of one rich man, sixteen working men and small citizens out of seventeen have had their legal right of voting wrested from them.

But even this, gentlemen, bad as it is, is only the average effect. In practice the matter assumes, in consequence of the varying circumstances of different localities, a very different and far more unfavourable aspect; and most unfavourable of all where the inequalities of property are the greatest. Thus the district of Düsseldorf has 6356 electors of the first class and 166,300 of the third class; twenty-six electors of the third class therefore exercise in that place the same voting power as one rich man.

To return from this digression to our main line of argument. We have shown, and have yet to adduce further proofs, that since the Bourgeoisie attained to power through the French Revolution, it has made its own element, private property, the ruling principle of all the arrangements of society; that the Bourgeoisie, behaving precisely as the nobles did in the middle ages with regard to landed property, now affix the predominant and exclusive impress of its peculiar principle, private property or capital, the impress of its privilege, upon all the arrangements of society. The parallel between the nobility and the Bourgeoisie is in this respect complete.