or potatoes, which is increased or decreased according to the existing demand. The laborers live not for themselves, but solely for the higher classes, in particular, for the capitalists. This is the way Lassalle expresses it to the laborers of Frankfort in an eloquent speech, which has not yet ceased to be a power in Germany: “What is the consequence of that law, which, as I have proved to you, is accepted by all political economists? What is the consequence of the same? I ask. You believe, perhaps, laborers and fellow-citizens, that you are human beings—that you are men. Speaking from the standpoint of political economy, you make a terrible mistake. Speaking from the standpoint of political economy, you are nothing but a commodity, a high price for which increases your numbers, just the same as a high price for stockings increases the number of stockings, if there are not enough of them; and you are swept away, your number is diminished by smaller wages—by what Malthus calls the preventive and positive checks to population; your number is diminished, just as if you were vermin against which society wages war.” Lassalle then shows them how much shorter the average of life is among the laboring classes than among the wealthy. He demonstrates to them that poor and insufficient food means starvation. “There are, gentlemen,” says he, “two ways of dying of starvation. It, indeed, happens seldom that a man falls down dead in a moment from hunger; but when a man is subjected to a greater expenditure of power than he is able to replace, on account of poor food or a miserable mode of life—when he gives out more physical energy than he takes in—then, I say, he dies of slow starvation.” Rehearse this in a thousand different ways and with all the resources of oratorical art, to laborers really ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed, and you shall indeed find yourself soon standing upon a volcano, whose forces are no longer latent and slumbering. In his definition of capital Lassalle clothes the same thought contained in his “Iron Law of Wages” in other words. The definition reads as follows: “Capital exists where a division of labor obtains and where production consists in the creation of values in exchange, and in such a system of production it is the advance of labor already performed (congealed, coagulated labor), which is necessary to sustain the life of the producer. This advance of coagulated labor brings it to pass that the excess of labor’s product over and above what is necessary to support the life of the producer accrues to the person or persons who made the advance.” The more one reflects upon this definition, the more meaning is discovered in it. It has furnished the text for many a social-democratic sermon. Like Marx, Lassalle holds that capital is based on a theft—on that theft, namely, “which deprived the masses of their right in the soil, in the earth—the common heritage of all.”