Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/456

 socialist, Rodbertus, to whom Lassalle next turned for assistance, had little faith in manhood suffrage and none at all in State-aided producers' associations. To confirm his unbelief in manhood suffrage he pointed to the ease with which a popular plébiscite could be manipulated by a Louis Napoleon. State-aided producers' associations, he declared to be incompatible with scientific socialism, a dangerous compromise between the national workshops advocated by the utopian socialist, Louis Blanc, and the coöperative corporations, advocated by the anarchist, Prudhomme. So Lassalle found himself alone at the head of his new independent labor party.

It was not the workingmen but the middle-class Progressive party that was most aroused by Lassalle's Open Letter. He was regarded as a traitor to the cause of the constitution and a practical ally of the forces of reaction—in short, as either a fool or a knave. Lassalle saw clearly enough that he could not succeed without making clear to his prospective followers the irreconcilability of liberalism and socialism, and directed his most powerful efforts against the position of the Progressive party. His Workingmen's Reader (May, 1863) and Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch (January, 1864) are conspicuous memorials of his campaign against liberalism. The liberal position was substantially that the workingmen, though without effective voting-power, were honorary members of the Progressive party, and hence needed no independent party of their own, and that, for the rest, they could best promote their special economic interests by "self-help," that is, through voluntary and unassisted coöperation. Liberal leaders, especially Schulze-Delitzsch, labored strenuously to improve the well-being of the working-classes along these lines, and their efforts were not in vain. The Progressive watchword, "right makes might," sophistical as it seemed to Lassalle, appealed to the idealism of the German people, and the party was in the heyday of its success. More and more Lassalle found himself forced by the necessities of