Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/60

 spirit, a development of an amount of happiness, culture, well-being, and freedom without example in the history of the world, and in comparison with which, the most favourable conditions that have existed in former times would appear but dim shadows of the reality.

This it is, gentlemen, which must be called the working man's idea of the State, his conception of the object of the State, which, as you see is just as different from the bourgeois conception of the object of the State, as the principle of the working class, of the claim of all to direct the will of the State, or universal suffrage, is different from the principle held by the Bourgeoisie, the census.

The series of ideas which I have explained to you must be regarded as the idea of the working class. It is this that I had in view when I spoke to you, at the commencement of my lecture, of the connection of the particular period of history in which we live with the idea of the working class. It is this period of history beginning with February, 1848, to which has been allotted the task of bringing this idea of the State into actual existence. We may congratulate ourselves, gentlemen, that we have been born at a time which is destined to witness this the most glorious work of history, and that we are permitted to take a part in accomplishing it.

But on all who belong to the working class the duty of taking up an entirely new attitude is imposed, if there is any truth in what I have said.

Nothing is more calculated to impress upon a class a worthy and moral character, than the consciousness