It was not the workingmen but the middle-class Progressive party that was most aroused by Lassalle's Open Letter. He was regarded as a traitor to the cause of the constitution and a practical ally of the forces of reaction—in short, as either a fool or a knave. Lassalle saw clearly enough that he could not succeed without making clear to his prospective followers the irreconcilability of liberalism and socialism, and directed his most powerful efforts against the position of the Progressive party. His Workingmen's Reader (May, 1863) and Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch (January, 1864) are conspicuous memorials of his campaign against liberalism. The liberal position was substantially that the workingmen, though without effective voting-power, were honorary members of the Progressive party, and hence needed no independent party of their own, and that, for the rest, they could best promote their special economic interests by "self-help," that is, through voluntary and unassisted coöperation. Liberal leaders, especially Schulze-Delitzsch, labored strenuously to improve the well-being of the working-classes along these lines, and their efforts were not in vain. The Progressive watchword, "right makes might," sophistical as it seemed to Lassalle, appealed to the idealism of the German people, and the party was in the heyday of its success. More and more Lassalle found himself forced by the necessities of his struggle with the Progressives into compromising relations with the government of Bismarck. His last great speech delivered at Ronsdorf on the first anniversary of the foundation of the Workingmen's Association betrays the dilemma into which he had fallen. Under the conditions of the time there was not enough room between the contending forces of progress and reaction for the great independent labor party which Lassalle had hoped to create. There was room for a humble beginning, but that was all.
It is not necessary to dwell on the details of Lassalle's last twelve months and tragic end. The story is brief: a year of exhausting toil and small result, then a short vacation, an unfortunate love-affair, a foolish challenge to a duel, a single pistol-shot, and three days later, August 31, 1864, the end. Thus he died, and on his tomb in Breslau was written: "Here lies what was mortal of Ferdinand Lassalle, the Thinker and Fighter."
The name of Lassalle is most frequently connected with that of Marx. Certainly the two had much in common. They worked together in 1848 and would have done so again in 1862 if Lassalle had had his way. For fourteen years they were personal friends. Though they ultimately drifted apart, they never became enemies. Lassalle was seven years younger than Marx and was unquestionably strongly influenced by the ideas of the founder of scientific socialism. At the same time he was a man who did his own thinking, and his speeches and writings, even those dealing most particularly with the philosophy of socialism, are by no means mere paraphrases of Marx. His ideas betray resemblances to those of various contemporary writers on socialism and the socialist movement, notably Lorenz von Stein, the author of the History of the Social Movements in France from 1789. The economic interpretation of history, set forth in the Workingmen's Programme, however, is in many respects but an amplification of the economic interpretation of history originally and more briefly set forth in the Communist Manifesto. The theory of economics in general and of wages in particular, contained in the Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, is substantially the same as that contained in Marx's Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859. Regarded solely as a theoretical socialist, Lassalle is rightly classed among the Marxians.
Yet Lassalle's position with regard to some important theoretical questions was distasteful to Marx. In philosophy, for example, Lassalle was a pure Hegelian and never abandoned the idealistic standpoint of his master. Marx, as is well known, was a materialistic Hegelian. The differences between them in this regard were revealed most clearly in the System of the Acquired Rights. Lassalle traced the development of the German laws of inheritance from the Roman concept of the immortality of the legal personality. Marx would have derived them from the conditions of life among the Germans themselves. In Franz von Sickingen and his cause Lassalle thought he saw a glimpse of the revolutionary spirit of modern times. Marx saw only a belated and futile struggle on the part of a member of the decadent medieval order of petty barons against the rising order of territorial princes. Had Lassalle linked up the cause of the petty barons with the revolt of the peasants, Marx would have thought better of his performance, but this Lassalle had neglected to do. In the Philosophy of Heraclitus Marx took little interest.
The most important differences between Marx and Lassalle arose with respect to the exigencies of practical politics. Marx, like Lassalle, was a democrat. Lassalle, however, consistently placed the demand for manhood suffrage in the forefront of his immediate political demands, whilst Marx believed that manhood suffrage under the then-existing conditions on the Continent of Europe would prove more useful to those who controlled the electoral machinery than to the workingmen themselves. Marx, like Lassalle, believed in the republican form of government. Lassalle, however, could recognize the temporary value of monarchical institutions in the struggle against the capitalistic system, whilst Marx would have had the workingmen depend upon themselves alone. Marx, like Lassalle, believed in the inevitableness of the fall of capitalism. Lassalle, however, could appreciate the desirability of realizing some portion of the promised future in the immediate present, whilst Marx preferred not to risk the prolongation of the life of the capitalistic system by attempting to discount the day when the wage-earning classes should come wholly into their own. Marx, like Lassalle, was a revolutionist. Lassalle, however, was interested primarily in bringing about the social revolution on German soil, whilst Marx was an internationalist, a veritable man without a country.
The two were bound to clash as soon as Lassalle began the development of his practical political programme. Marx was not only sceptical of the wisdom of Lassalle's campaign for manhood suffrage, but he was even strongly opposed to the campaign for the establishment of producers' associations with the aid of subventions from the Prussian monarchy. That programme represented all that was odious to Marx: organization of the wage-earners on purely national instead of international lines, conversion of private ownership of capital into corporate instead of public ownership, establishment of a social monarchy instead of a coöperative commonwealth. Obviously Marx could not endorse Lassalle's proposals to make the socialist movement a factor in contemporary German politics, nor did Lassalle endorse the Marxian policy presently embodied in the "International."
In the matter of programme and tactics neither Marx nor Lassalle has been altogether justified by the verdict of history. In the beginning the followers of Lassalle and the followers of Marx pursued their common ends by independent roads. Brought together by the logic of events, they composed their differences, taking what seemed best to serve their purpose from the ideas of each. It is known that Marx was harshly critical of the programme adopted at Gotha in 1875. It may be guessed that Lassalle, had he lived, would not altogether have approved of the tactics pursued by those in charge of the united party's affairs. Today, the Social Democratic party, having grown strong and great, can recognize its obligations to both Marx and Lassalle.
Lassalle and Marx had entirely different functions to perform in the socialist movement. Marx's part was to be the prophet of socialism, not a prophet in the vulgar sense of a mere prognosticator, but in the old Hebrew sense of an inspired voice crying in a wilderness of unbelief. Lassalle was no prophet. His function was to reduce principles to action, to engage the forces of the times in the spirit of the times, and by combat with such weapons as lay to hand to urge the cause forward. The word "agitator" might have been invented for him. He was the first great warrior of socialism. It is no reflection upon Marx to indicate that the present need of the Social Democracy is for warriors rather than for prophets.
Lassalle was one of the great figures of modern German history. Bismarck's judgment of men was of the keenest and his opinion of Lassalle, expressed in a speech before the Reichstag (September 16, 1878) is well known: "In private life Lassalle possessed an extraordinary attraction for me, being one of the most brilliant and most agreeable men I have ever met, and ambitious in the biggest sense of the term." The eminent classical historian, Boeckh, who knew Lassalle well, compared him to Alcibiades. Heine, in a letter introducing Lassalle to a friend, wrote: "I present to you a new Mirabeau." There is much that is striking in either of these parallels.
Thoughts of what might have been, had Lassalle's career in politics not been brought to so melancholy an end, are likely to be idle. Helen von Racowitza, the pathetic instrument of his fate, not unnaturally indulged her fancy in such thoughts. Writing in her old age she queries: "Would he, … with his incomparable ambition and will, ever have been able to adapt himself to the compact edifice of the German empire? Assuredly it must always have seemed to him like a prison!" To a woman wracked by remorse it may have been comforting to believe that when the catastrophe occurred the work of the man she once had loved was really completed. Doubtless indeed Lassalle himself had begun to realize, short as was the period from the foundation of the Workingmen's Association to the fatal duel with the Rumanian Yanko, that he could not bring his enterprise to a head as quickly as he had hoped. Doubtless he already saw that the establishment of an independent labor party was not a matter of a single hard-fought campaign, to be waged and won by the genius of any one great leader, but a task requiring long and patient toil and the indefinite postponement of the sweet joys of victory. Certainly in his last months Lassalle showed an unwise readiness seriously to compromise his position for the sake of more immediate success. Had he lived, he would soon have discovered that he must retrace those latest steps, or Bismarck, and not he, would have been the actual leader of the first German independent labor party. There was nothing in Lassalle's life to warrant the assumption that he would deliberately sell his party for a mess of pottage. Lassalle had put his hand to the plow and it was not in his nature to leave the furrow unturned.