Conspicuously of the upper middle-class were the July revolution of 1830 in France and the agitation of 1848 in Germany. In both cases we see citizenship in strife with feudal forces. Less clearly appears the civic character of the revolution of 1832 in England, and of the February revolution of 1848 in France, because these agitations were directed against forms of government sustained by citizens themselves. Yet even these movements, of 1832 in England and the February revolution in France, are not proletarian; they are rather the struggle of a part of the middle-class, the radicals, against another part, the _Haute finance_. This very opposition is now to be found again in Italy in the struggle of the North Italian industries against the rotten, half-feudal _Haute finance_ which Crispi represents. These are the agitations of our century which have been definite and conscious of their aim. In all of them the proletariat has been involved, behind all the barricades from 1789 to 1848 lie proletarian bodies; but of all those movements of which I have thus told you, not a single one is proletarian, or in our sense a social movement. Where now the proletariat fights for itself and represents its own interests we discern at first mere muttered, inarticulate sounds; and it takes long for these tones to rise to cries, for these cries to grow to general demands, and to become crystallised into programmes. The first proletarian agitations--movements of the unhappy, deeply buried mass--are, according to Carlyle's word, like the movements of Enceladus, who as he quivers in his pain causes an earthquake. These are movements of an entirely instinctive kind, claiming that which lies next, and attacking that which seems to them evidently to stand in the way. These are deeds which originally and largely assume the form of robbery and plunder. They have as their object to injure in some way the enemy in his power of possession. In England towards the close of the preceding and the beginning of the present century there was much destruction and plundering of manufactories. In the year 1812 the demolition of factories was punished in England with death, the best proof of the frequency of the fact. In other lands we have similar occurrences. I think of the factory-burning in Uster in Switzerland in the year 1832, of the weavers' riots in Germany in 1840, of the Lyons silk-weavers' insurrection in France in 1831. This last distinguishes itself from previous events of a similar character by the fact that it assumes as its great motive the motto which indeed we can think of as written over the portal of the proletarian movement: _Vivre en travaillant, ou mourir en combattant!_ That is the first timid formulation of proletarian struggle, because the battle-cry is negatively and positively an expression of true proletarian-socialistic effort: negatively--no one shall live who does not work; positively--those who work shall be able to live. Thus this