paid no direct taxes, and had no right to vote. The effect of this distinction was to exclude the whole labouring classes from the franchise; and under the July Monarchy, while the real nation consisted of some thirty millions, the legal nation (_pays légal_), the people legally possessed of political rights, amounted to no more than 200,000, whom the Government found it only too easy to manage and corrupt. The revolution of 1848 was simply a revolt against this injustice. It was a revolt of the fourth estate against the privileges of the third, as the first revolution was a revolt of the third against the privileges of the other two. Nor were the privileges which the _bourgeoisie_ had contrived to acquire confined to political rights alone; they included also fiscal exemptions. According to the latest statistical returns, it appeared that five-sixths of the revenue of Prussia came from indirect taxation, and indirect taxes were always taken disproportionately out of the pockets of the working class. A man might be twenty times richer than another, but he did not therefore consume twenty times the amount of bread, salt, or beer. Taxation ought to be in ratio of means, and indirect taxation--so much favoured by the _bourgeoisie_--was simply an expedient for saving the rich at the expense of the poor. Now, the revolution of 1848 was a fight for the emancipation of the working class from this unequal distribution of political rights and burdens. The working class was really not a class at all, but was the nation; and the aim of the State should be their amelioration. "What is the State?" asks Lassalle. "You are the State," he replies. "You are ninety-six per cent. of the population. All political power ought to be of you, and through you, and for you; and your good and amelioration ought to be the aim of the State. It ought to be so, because your good is not a class interest, but is the national interest." The fourth estate differs from the feudal interest, and differs from the _bourgeoisie_, not merely in that it is not a privileged class, but in that it cannot possibly become one. It cannot degenerate, as the _bourgeoisie_ had done, into a privileged and exclusive caste; because, consisting as it does of the great body of the people, its class interest and the common good are identical, or at least harmonious. "Your affair is the affair of mankind; your personal interest moves and beats with the pulse of history, with the living principle of moral development."