Lassalle supplies the key to his general position in the preface to his _Bastiat-Schulze_, when, quoting from his _System of Acquired Rights_, he says: In social matters the world is confronted with the question, whether now when property in the direct utilisation of another man no longer exists, such property in his indirect exploitation should continue—that is, whether the free realisation and development of our labour-force should be the exclusive private property of the possessor of capital, and whether the employer as such, and apart from the remuneration of his intellectual labour, should be permitted to appropriate the result of other men’s labours.[1] This sentence, he says, contains the programme of a national-economic work, which he intended to write under the title, _Outlines of a Scientific National Economy_. In this sentence also, we need not say, the fundamental position of socialism is implied. He was about to carry out his project when the Leipsic Central Committee brought the question before him in a practical form. The agitation broke out and left him no leisure for such a work. But he had often lamented that the exposition of the theory had not preceded the practical agitation, and that a scientific basis had not been provided for it. The _Bastiat-Schulze_ was itself a controversial work, written to meet the needs of the hour. Lassalle has never given a full and systematic exposition of his socialistic theory. All his social-economic writings were published as the crises of his agitation seemed to demand. But, as he himself says, they compensate by the life and incisiveness of the polemical form of treatment for what they lose in systematic value. We may add that it is often a scientific gain, for in the career of Lassalle we see socialism confronted with fact, and thereby to a large extent saved from the absoluteness, abstractness, and deficient sense of reality which detract so much from the value of the works of Marx and Rodbertus. The excessive love of system so characteristic of German theorists may be as remote from historic reality and possibility as the utopian schemes of French socialists. It is, however, also a natural result of Lassalle’s mode of presentation that he is not always consistent with himself either on practical or theoretical questions, especially in his attitude towards the Prussian State. On the whole, we can most clearly and comprehensively bring out the views of Lassalle if we follow the order in which they are presented in his three leading works, the _Working Men’s Programme_, the _Open Letter_, and the _Bastiat-Schulze_.