Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/560

 of certain ends; it never attempts to show that criminal means have been employed, or that I have, in my address, urged the employment of such means. But even if I had been guilty of urging the working classes to resort to criminal means for gaining control over the other classes of society, then I could only have been indicted under Article 61, or some other article of the criminal code, but never under Article 100, or as having offended against that article by an instigation of the workingmen to hatred and contempt; for such an exhortation addressed to the working classes to make themselves masters of the other classes of society must have incited the workingmen to political ambition, but by no means to hatred and contempt of any third party. This ambition on the part of the workingmen could, of course, not have been fathered upon the bourgeoisie; and since responsibility for it could not have been put upon them, hatred and contempt of them could not have been aroused by the fact of such an ambition. It therefore appears again that this passage is quite devoid of grammatical and logical content. But upon what ground has the public prosecutor read into my address an exhortation urging to the pursuit of "mastery on the part of the workingmen over the other classes of society?"

All that I have to say in my pamphlet bearing on this head is that it is the destiny of the historical epoch beginning with February, 1848, to install the ethical principle of the working classes as the dominant principle of society, to make it the guiding principle of the State; the nature of this principle is expounded in my pamphlet, and I have already restated it in outline in the introductory part of my speech.

I repeatedly and explicitly express myself to the same effect. So I say (page 31) that, as in 1789 the revolution was a revolution of the third estate, so in this later case it was a revolution of the fourth estate, "which now seeks to erect its principle into the dominant principle of society and to permeate all institutions with it." Or again