Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/55

 A very reasonable instinct warns the members of the lower classes, that so long as each of them relates himself only to himself, and each one thinks only of himself, he can hope for no important improvement in his position.

But the more earnestly and deeply the lower classes of society strive after the improvement of their condition as a class, the improvement of the lot of then class, the more does this personal interest, instead of opposing the movement of history and thereby being condemned to that immorality of which we have spoken, assume a direction which thoroughly accords with the development of the whole people, with the victory of the idea, with the advance of culture, with the living principle of history itself, which is no other than the development of freedom. Or in other words, as we have already seen, its interest is the interest of the entire human race.

You are therefore in this happy position, gentlemen, that instead of its being possible for you to be dead to the idea, you are on the contrary urged to the deepest sympathy for it by your own personal interests. You are in the happy position that the idea which constitutes your true personal interest, is one with the throbbing pulse of history, and with the living principle of moral development. You are able therefore to devote yourselves with personal passion to this historical development, and to be certain that the more strongly this passion grows and burns within you in the true sense in which I have explained it to you, the higher is the moral position you have attained.

These are the reasons, gentlemen, why the dominion