Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/542

 But in this address of mine, I show that the dominance of this principle of the bourgeoisie, against which I am by the public prosecutor accused of inciting to hatred and contempt, is but a stage of economic and ethical development, which is the outcome of historical necessity, and that its nonexistence is an utter impossibility and that it therefore has all the character of natural necessity that belongs to the developmental progress of the earth.

Do we hate Nature because we have to struggle with her? Because we have to strive to guide her processes and improve her products?

But there is the further question: How has the public prosecutor understood my pamphlet?

The fundamental idea of my address is that the dominance of the bourgeoisie has in no wise been produced, consciously and by their own motion, intentionally and in a responsible manner, by the propertied class as persons or individuals. On the contrary, the bourgeois are but the unconscious, choiceless, and therefore irresponsible products, not the producers of the situation as it stands and as it has developed under the guidance of quite other laws than the direction of personal choice. Even their reluctance to surrender this their mastery I refer back to the laws of human nature, whose character it is to hold fast to whatever is and to account it necessary. But a doctrine which goes the length of denying the propertied class all responsibility for the existing state of things, which makes them a product instead of the producers of this state of things—this doctrine the public prosecutor construes to have incited to hatred and contempt of these persons.

For, be it noted, we have here to do with persons and classes of persons, under section 100, not with institutions established by the State, as under section 101.

No workingman has got so faulty an understanding of my address as the public prosecutor, and I leave it to him to say whether this is due to his lack of understanding or to his lack of will to understand.