From this right, however, they allege the existing industrial system absolutely excludes the great majority. The freeman cannot realize his freedom, the individual cannot realize his individuality, without a certain external economic basis of work and enjoyment, and the best way to furnish him with this is to clothe him in various ways with collective property. Lassalle's argument, however, is still more specific than this. In the beginning of his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze," he quotes a passage from his previous work on "The System of Acquired Rights," which he informs us he had intended to expand into a systematic treatise on "The Principles of Scientific National Economy." This intention he was actually preparing to fulfil when the Leipzig invitation and letter diverted him at once into practical agitation. He regrets that circumstances had thus not permitted the practical agitation to be preceded by the theoretical codex which should be the basis for it, but adds that the substance of his theory is contained in this polemic against Schultze-Delitzsch, though the form of its exposition is considerably modified by his plan of following the ideas of Schultze's "Working Men's Catechism," and by his purpose of answering Schultze's misplaced taunt of "half knowledge" by trying to extinguish the economic pretensions of the latter as completely as he had done the literary pretensions of Julian Schmidt. "Every line I write," says Lassalle, with a characteristic finality of self-confidence, "I write armed with the whole culture of my century"; and at any rate Schultze-Delitzsch was far his inferior in economic as in other knowledge. In the passage to which I have referred, Lassalle says, "The world is now face to face with a new social question, the question whether, since there is no longer any property in the immediate use of another man, there should still exist property in his mediate exploitation--_i.e._, whether the free realization and development of one's power and labour should be the exclusive private property of the owner of the instruments and advances necessary for labour--_i.e._, of capital; and whether the employer as such, and apart from the remuneration of his own intellectual labour of management, should be permitted to have property in the value of other people's labour--_i.e._, whether he ought to receive what is known as the premium or profit of capital, consisting of the difference between the selling price of the product and the sum of the wages and salaries of all kinds of labour, manual and mental, that have contributed to its production."