Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/54

 own people, amongst whom they live, and for whom to strive constitutes all true morality. It is to lead their lives, I say, as in the country of an enemy; this enemy is their own people, and the fact that it is regarded and treated as their enemy must generally at all events be cunningly concealed, and this hostility must more or less artfully be covered with a veil.

And to this we must add that either they must do all this against the voice of their own conscience and intelligence, or they must have stifled the voice by habit so as not to be oppressed by it, or lastly they must have never known this voice, never known anything different and better than the religion of their own advantage!

This life, gentlemen, leads therefore necessarily to a thorough depreciation and contempt of all striving to realise an ideal, to a compassionate smile at the bare mention of the great name of the Idea, to a deeply seated want of sympathy and even antipathy to all that is beautiful and great, to a complete swallowing up of every moral element in us, by the one passion of selfish seeking for our own advantage, and of immoderate desire for pleasure.

It is this opposition, gentlemen, between personal interest and the development of the nation in culture, which the lower classes, happily for them, are without.

It is unfortunately true that there is always enough of selfishness in the lower classes, much more than there should be, but this selfishness of theirs, wherever it is found, is the fault of single persons, of individuals, and not the inevitable fault of the class.