Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/475

 This is always the case in all revolutions. You can never make a revolution. You can only give external legal recognition and logical embodiment in practice to a revolution which has already become an actuality in the essential relations of society. Trying to make a revolution is the folly of immature men who have no conception of the laws of history.

Precisely for this reason it is just as immature and childish to suppress a revolution already fully formed in the womb of society and to oppose its legal recognition, or to reproach those who assist at its birth with being revolutionary. If the revolution is at hand in the actual conditions of society, nothing can prevent its appearing and passing into legislation.

How these things were related, and how far they had already gone in this direction in the period of which I speak, you will best see from another matter which I will mention.

I have already spoken about the division of labor, the development of which consists of separating all production into a series of entirely simple mechanical operations requiring no thought on the part of the operator. As this separation progresses farther and farther, the discovery is finally made that these single operations, because they are quite simple and call for no thought, can be accomplished just as well, and even better, by unthinking agents; and so in 1775, fourteen years before the French Revolution, Arkwright invented the first machine, his famous spinning-jenny.

We can see that the machine in itself was not the cause of the revolution. Too little time intervened between this invention, which furthermore was not immediately introduced into France, and the revolution; but it embodied in itself the actually incipient and fully ripe revolution. This machine, however innocent it seemed, was in fact the revolution personified. The reasons for this are simple.

You, of course, have heard of the guild system, by which