In the summer of 1863 little was accomplished. The membership of the Association grew but slowly, and, according to his wont, Lassalle retired to the baths to recruit his health. In the autumn he renewed his agitation by a ‘review’ of his forces on the Rhine, where the workmen were most enthusiastic in his favour. But the severest crisis of his agitation befell during the winter of 1863-4. At this period his labours were almost more than human; he wrote his _Bastiat-Schulze_,[4] a considerable treatise, in about three months, defended himself before the courts both of Berlin and the Rhine in elaborate speeches, conducted the affairs of his Association in all their troublesome details, and often before stormy and hostile audiences gave a succession of addresses, the aim of which was the conquest of Berlin. Lassalle’s _Bastiat-Schulze_, his largest economic work, bears all the marks of the haste and feverishness of the time that gave it birth. It contains passages in the worst possible taste; the coarseness and scurrility of his treatment of Schulze are absolutely unjustifiable. The book consists of barren and unprofitable controversy, interspersed with philosophic statements of his economic position, and even they are often crude, confused, and exaggerated. Controversy is usually the most unsatisfactory department of literature, and of the various forms of controversy that of Lassalle is the least to be desired, consisting as it so largely did of supercilious verbal and captious objection. The book as a whole is far below the level of the _Working Men’s Programme_ and the _Open Letter_. After all these labours little wonder that we find him writing, on the 14th of February: ‘I am tired to death, and strong as my constitution is, it is shaking to the core. My excitement is so great that I can no longer sleep at night; I toss about on my bed till five o’clock, and rise up with aching head, and entirely exhausted. I am overworked, overtasked, and overtired in the frightfullest degree; the mad effort, beside my other labours, to finish the _Bastiat-Schulze_ in three months, the profound and painful disappointment, the cankering inner disgust, caused by the indifference and apathy of the working class taken as a whole—all has been too much even for me.’