Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/45

 no private property to back them. This is a fact which you have no need to learn from my lecture, but which, unhappily, you can verify often enough by your own daily experience.

Nay, in many respects the Bourgeoisie carries out more thoroughly and logically the dominion of its own peculiar element and privileges, than did the noble in the Middle Ages with respect to the landed interest.

The education of the people—I speak here of the education of adults—was in the Middle Ages left in the hands of the clergy. Since then the newspapers have undertaken this office. But owing to the caution money which the journals must deposit, and still more to the stamp duty which is imposed on the newspapers here, in France, and in other countries, to start a daily paper is a very expensive business that can only be undertaken with the help of a large amount of capital; so that by this means the possibility of appealing to the thought of the people, of enlightening and leading them, has become a privilege of the possessors of capital.

If this were not the case, gentlemen, you would possess very different, and much better journals!

It is interesting to see, gentlemen, at what an early period this attempt of the richer Bourgeoise to make the press one of the privileges of capital, showed itself, and in what a naive undisguised form. On the 24th July, 1789, a few days after the storming of the Bastille, and therefore soon after the Bourgeoisie had seized upon political power, the representatives of the Commune of Paris issued a decree by which the printers were declared to be responsible for the publication of pamphlets