For the methods of Schulze it may be claimed that they do not provide a ready-made solution of the social question, but they are a beginning. For the associations of Schulze, not less than for those of Lassalle, we may contend that they supply the organic principle of an incessant development. In this way the workmen may attain to the complete management of their own industrial interests with their own joint capital. They may thus obtain for themselves the full product of their labour, in which case the objection of Lassalle, with regard to the increase of population, under the influence of the cheap provisions supplied by the stores, would no more apply to the scheme of Schulze than they would to his own. In both cases we are to suppose that the means of subsistence would be more abundant and more easily obtained; in both cases there might be the risk of a too rapidly increasing population. We may suppose that this increase of population would be met by a still greater increase in the product of labour, all going to the workers. But for the schemes of Schulze there would be this great advantage that, the capital and experience of the workers having been acquired by their own exertions, they would have all the superior training requisite for the solution of the population question, and all other questions, which can be obtained only from a long course of social discipline. Lassalle would have done well to remember his own statement, that the only real point of difference between them was, that one believed in State help, and the other in ‘self help.’ And we may further ask, Do the two exclude each other? In fact, the controversy, considered purely on its merits, was barren enough. Yet it led to profitable results, inasmuch as it directed the mind of Germany to the questions involved, and led to a more thorough discussion of them. Better, however, than any argument which can be urged is the verdict of history on the merits of the question, as already pronounced during the period which has elapsed since the date of the controversy. In 1885, just twenty-one years after the bitter controversy between the two representatives of State help and self help, the societies established by Schulze in Germany alone possessed one hundred million thalers of capital of their own. It will be remembered that this is the amount of the loan required by Lassalle from the State to bring his productive associations into operation. If the workmen fail in productive association, it will not be, as Lassalle maintained, for want of capital. Productive association with State credit is therefore not the only way out of the wilderness.