Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/59

 other words, to bring the destiny of man—that is the culture of which the human race is capable—into actual existence; it is the training and development of the human race to freedom.

This is the true moral nature of the State, gentlemen, its true and high mission. So much is this the case, that from the beginning of time through the very force of events it has more or less been carried out by the State without the exercise of will, and unconsciously even against the will of its leaders.

But the working class, gentlemen, the lower classes of the community in general, through the helpless condition in which its members find themselves placed as individuals, have always acquired the deep instinct, that this is and must be the duty of the State, to help the individual by means of the union of all to such a development as he would be incapable of attaining as an individual.

A State therefore which was ruled by the idea of the working class, would no longer be driven, as all States have hitherto been, unconsciously and against their will by the nature of things, and the force of circumstances, but it would make this moral nature of the State its mission, with perfect clearness of vision and complete consciousness. It would complete with unchecked desire and perfect consistency, that which hitherto has only been wrung in scanty and imperfect fragments from wills that were opposed to it, and for this very reason—though time does not permit me to explain in any detail this necessary connection of cause and effect—it would produce a soaring flight of the human