Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/480

 amount of property and capital, and on that basis engage in production or receive an income from it. These can be called the capitalists; but no capitalist is a bourgeois merely because of his wealth.

No commoner has any objection to a nobleman's rejoicing privately over his ancestry and his landed estates. But if the nobleman tries to make these ancestors or these landed estates the condition of special influence and privilege in the government, of control over public policy, then the anger of the commoner rises against the nobleman and he calls him a feudalist.

Conditions are the same with reference to the actual difference of property within the class of commoners. If the capitalist rejoices in private over the great convenience and advantage which a large estate implies for the holder, nothing is more simple, more moral, and more lawful.

To whatever extent the laborer and the poorer citizen—in a word, all classes outside the capitalists—are entitled to demand from the State that its whole thought and effort be directed toward improving the lamentable and poverty-stricken material condition of the working classes and toward assuring to them, through whose hands all the wealth is produced of which our civilization boasts, to whose hands all products owe their being, without whom society as a whole could not exist another day, a more abundant and less uncertain revenue, and thus the possibility of intellectual culture, and, in time, an existence really worthy of a human being—however much, I say, the working classes are entitled to demand this from the State and to establish this as its true object, the workingmen must and will never forget that all property once lawfully acquired is completely inviolable and legitimate.

But if the capitalist, not satisfied with the actual advantages of large property, tries to establish the possession of capital as a condition for participation in the control of the State and in the determination of public policy, then the capitalist becomes a bourgeois, then he makes the fact of