The State should be the complement of the individual. It must be ready to offer a helping hand, wherever and whenever individuals are unable to realise the happiness, freedom, and culture which befit a human being. Save the State, that primitive vestal fire of culture, from the modern barbarians, he exclaims on another occasion. To these political conceptions Lassalle is true throughout. It certainly is a nobler and more rational ideal of the State than the once prevalent Manchester theory. When we descend from theory to practice all obviously depends on what kind of State we have got, and on the circumstances and conditions under which it is called upon to act. That the State should, through its various organs, support and develop individual effort, calling it forth, rendering it hopeful and effectual, never weakening the springs of it, but stimulating and completing it, is a position which most thinkers would now accept. And most will admit with regret that the existing State is too much a great taxing and fighting machine. The field of inquiry here opened up is a wide and tempting one, on which we cannot now enter. We are at present concerned with the fact that the State help contemplated by Lassalle was meant not only to leave the individual free, but to further him in the free realisation of himself. The _Iron Law of Wages_ may well be described as the key to Lassalle’s social-economic position. It holds the same prominent place in his system of thinking as the theory of surplus value does in that of Marx. Both, it may be added, are only different aspects of the same fact. Lassalle insists chiefly on the small share of the produce of labour which goes to the labourer; Marx traces the history of the share, called surplus value, which goes to the capitalist.