guiding and training the human race to positive and progressive development; in other words, for bringing human destiny (_i.e._, the culture of which man as man is susceptible) to real shape and form in actual existence. Not freedom, but development is now the keynote. The State must take a positive part, proportioned to its immense capacity, in the great work which, as he has said, constitutes history, and must forward man's progressive conquest over misery, ignorance, poverty, and restrictions of every sort. This is the purpose, the essence, the moral nature of the State, which she can never entirely abrogate, without ceasing to be, and which she has indeed always been obliged, by the very force of things, more or less to fulfil, often without her conscious consent, and sometimes in spite of the opposition of her leaders. In a word, the State must, by the union of all, help each to his full development. This was the earnest and noble idea of 1848. It is the idea of the new age, the age of labour, and it cannot fail to have a most important and beneficial bearing on the course of politics and legislation whenever it is permitted to have free operation in that sphere by means of universal and direct suffrage. This exposition of Lassalle's teaching in his "Working Men's Programme" already furnishes us with the transition to his economic views. Every age of the world, he held, has its own ruling idea. The idea of the working class is the ruling idea of the new epoch we have now entered on, and that idea implies that every man is entitled to a _menschenwürdiges Dasein_, to an existence worthy of his moral destiny, and that the State is bound to make this a governing consideration in its legislative and executive work. Man's destiny is to progressive civilization, and a condition of society which makes progressive civilization the exclusive property of the few, and practically debars the vast mass of the people from participation in it, stands in the present age self-condemned. It no longer corresponds to its own idea. Society has long since declared no man shall be enslaved; society has more recently declared no man shall be ignorant; society now declares no man shall be without property. He cannot be really free without property any more than he can be really free without knowledge. He has been released successively from a state of legal dependence and from a state of intellectual dependence; he must now be released from a state of economic dependence. This is his final emancipation, which is necessary to enable him to reap any fruits from the other two, and it cannot take place without a complete transformation of present industrial arrangements. It is a common mistake, he said, to think that socialists take their stand on equality. They really take their stand on freedom. They argue that the positive side of freedom is development, and if every man has a right to freedom, then every man has a right to the possibility of development.