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 214 themselves together for that struggle which only ended with the French war and the establishment of the German empire. The Liberals who then ruled Prussia, and who were about to be swept by Bismarck away into insignificance, "hoist by their own petard of nationalism" which carried militarism in its womb, had opened their pusillanimous policy of "standing where they were." Lassalle separated from them, declared that it was folly to prate about things which were unreal and verbal, and appealed to Prussia to take its stand upon the actual facts and go back upon democratic rule. The fires of Lassalle's nature were again ablaze. In 1862 he delivered a lecture which was nearly as epoch-making as the Communist Manifesto, and it was published under the title of The Working Men's Programme. Its purpose was to show that the Prussian working men had now to unite for political purposes. The police paid attention to both the lecture and the orator who, after a trial and an appeal, was sentenced to pay a fine of about £15.

Events then happened which were in some ways curiously like what occurred in our own country shortly after 1880 when the workers began to lose confidence in the Liberal Party. The working men of Leipzig, having left Liberalism, called a Labour congress. To this Lassalle sent an Open Letter in which he appealed to the workers to form a political party with social aims; he stated the Iron Law expressing the tendency of wages to fall to the bare subsistence level and nothing