Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/550

 of the upper-middle class, is a bourgeois in case he proceeds to set up the essentially harmless and inoffensive fact of his large property as a legal condition of participation in the direction of public affairs; in short, when he proceeds to set up the ownership of capital as a legal and political prerogative, and so abolishes the equality of the propertied and the unpropertied classes before the law, and thereby infringes upon the liberty and further growth of the people, in the interest of accumulated wealth and continued upper-class mastery. Only under these circumstances, as I particularly point out, does the bourgeoisie become a privileged class, which it otherwise, in spite of all inequality of wealth, is not.

In my pamphlet I point out how all this has its effect through the census rating whereby admission to a share in the direction of public policy, through eligibility to any legislative body, is so limited by property qualifications as to make the possession of capital a prerequisite. I point out further that this effect follows equally whether the property qualification is open and above-board or under-hand, and finally that the existing three-class system of elections, dating back to 1849, amounts to such an under-hand, disguised property rating.

The point at which the pamphlet strikes, therefore, albeit in a purely theoretical way, is the three-class system of elections. It makes no attack upon the propertied classes, whose accumulated wealth, on the contrary, I am repeatedly at pains to define as wholly incontestable, inoffensive, inviolable and perfectly lawful.

This three-class system of elections is one of our political institutions.

Now, this being the case, why has not the public prosecutor indicted me under section 101 of the criminal code, "for having exposed the measures of the State to hatred and to contempt?" To be sure, if the prosecutor had chosen to make this charge, I should have known how to answer him. To go into this matter today would be