Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/22

 No; the jurors shall be chosen by free universal election out of the body of the people in order that it be in truth a tribunal of the people.

In a municipality, which is a state within a state, the subordination of the subject majority to the special interests of the ruling minority stands out more plainly than in a great state, since ruler and ruled, physically nearer, are in direct personal contact with each other.

The ruling minority tax, according to their desire, the subject majority, burden them with the principal weight of taxation, turn the proceeds to their own profit and throw down at most only the crumbs to "the wretched tax-paying plebs." From the sweat of labor they erect advanced academies for the children of the wealthy, from which the children of the poor are shut out. In order to indulge to their satisfaction they build theaters, whose entrance price frightens the worker at the threshold, but to be sure this is no great disadvantage to him, since the modern theater (exceptions confirm the rule) does service only to the most corrupt taste, for it has become degraded to a refined brothel by the ruling class. In short, the ruling minority proceed in the city after the self-same egotistic, pernicious principle as in the state. This must be remedied. The social democracy demands, therefore, as for the state so for the municipality, universal, equal, free and direct suffrage, complete privilege and equalization, as for the citizen of the state so for the inhabitant of the city—a free community in a free state.

In order, however, to make the state and community what they should be—that is to say, an asssociationassociation [sic] of free and equal men, who in brotherly solidarity and fraternal co-operation, "each for all and all for each," strive for the highest possible spiritual and physical well-being of every individual—it is essential that the