"Der Bahn, der kühnen, folgen wir,
Die uns geführt Lassalle."
Such is the Marseillaise the Social Democrats of Germany sing, as they troop out when the police break up their meetings.
This Lassalle, whose bold lead they profess to follow, lies at rest in the Jewish cemetery of his native Breslau under the simple epitaph "Thinker and Fighter," and at his death the extraordinary popular manifestations seemed to inaugurate the cult of a modern Messiah—the Saviour of the People.
II
But no man is a hero to his valet or his relatives, and on the spring morning when Lassalle stood at the parting of the ways—where the Thinker's path debouched on the Fighter's—his brother-in-law from Prague, being in Berlin on business, took the opportunity of remonstrating.
"I can't understand what you mean by such productions," he cried, excitedly waving a couple of pamphlets.
"That is not my fault, my dear Friedland," said Lassalle suavely. "It takes some brain to follow even what I have put so clearly. What have you there?"
"The lecture to the artisans, for which you have to go to gaol for four months," said the outraged ornament of Prague society, which he illumined as well as adorned, having, in fact, the town's gas-contract.
"Not so fast. There is my appeal yet before the Kammergericht. And take care that you are not in gaol first; that pamphlet is either one of the suppressed editions, or has been smuggled in from Zürich, a proof in itself of that negative concept of the State which the pamphlet aims at destroying. Your State is a mere night-watchman—it protects the citizen but it does nothing to form him. It keeps off ideas, but it has none of its own. But the State, as friend Bœckh puts it, should be the institution in which the whole virtue of mankind realizes itself. It should sum up human experience and wisdom, and fashion its members in accordance therewith. What is history but the story of man's struggle with nature? And what is a State but the socialization of this struggle, the stronger helping the weaker?"
"Nonsense! Why should we help the lower classes?"