Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/47

 which has for its principle large private property, or capital, and makes this into the privilege which pervades all the arrangements of society, and is the condition of participation in directing the will of the State and determining its aims.

This period also, little as outward appearances seem to show it, is virtually already closed.

On the 24th February 1848, the dawn of a new period of history appeared.

For on that day in France (that country in whose great struggles the victory or the defeat of freedom means victory or defeat for the whole human race) a revolution broke out which called a working man into the provisional Government, declared that the object of the State was the improvement of the lot of the working classes, and proclaimed the universal and direct right to the suffrage, by which every citizen who had attained his twenty-first year, without any reference to the amount of his property, received an equal share in the government of the State in the direction of its will and the determination of its aims.

You see, gentlemen, that if the Revolution of 1789 was the Revolution of the Tiers état, the Third class, it is now the Fourth class, which in 1789 was still enfolded within the third class and appeared to be identical with it, which will now raise its principle to be the dominating principle of the community, and cause all its arrangements to be permeated by it.

But here, in the domination of the fourth class comes to light this immense difference, that the fourth class is the last and the outside of all, the disinterested class