Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/53

 over them in education and training which are recognised as moralising elements.

The following is the true ground of what as I said appears at first sight to be extraordinary paradox.

In a long period in the past, as we have seen, the development of the people, which is the life-breath of history, proceeds by an ever advancing abolition of the privileges which guarantee to the higher classes their position as higher and ruling classes. The desire to maintain this, in other words their personal interest, brings therefore every member of the higher classes who has not once for all by a high range of vision elevated himself above his purely personal existence—and you will understand, gentlemen, that this can never be more than a very small number of exceptional characters—into a position thoroughly hostile in principle to the development of the people, to the progress of education and science, to the advance of culture, to all the life-breath and victory of historic life.

It is this opposition of the personal interest of the higher classes to the development of the nation in culture which evokes the great and necessary immorality of the higher classes. It is a life, whose daily conditions you need only represent to yourselves, in order to perceive the deep inward deterioration to which it must lead. To be compelled daily to oppose all that is great and good, to be obliged to grieve at its successes, to rejoice at its failures, to restrain its further progress, to be obliged to undo or to execrate the advantages it has already attained. It is to lead their life as in the country of an enemy—and this enemy is the moral community of their