FERDINAND LASSALLE. 
43 
an influence so great and so extended, acquired in so short 
a period. 
Ferdinand Lassalle, like Karl Marx, was of Jewish origin,* 
and was born at Breslau on the nth of April, 1825. His 
father, a wholesale dealer, wished him to follow the same 
business. After having brilliantly terminated his classical 
studies at the college of his native town, he was sent to the 
commercial school of Leipsic ; but utterly disgusted with this 
class of study, he entered the university and occupied himself 
with philology, philosophy, and law. His attention was early 
attracted by economic facts ; for he relates in his book, 
Bastiai-Schultze, that at the age of twelve he was astonished 
to find his mother and sister buying in retail shops the same 
goods his father sold wholesale. At the university he became 
an enthusiastic admirer of Fichte, and above all of Hegel, who 
was his master in the high regions of thought. In politics he 
adopted the ideas of Young Germany, and ranged himself on 
the side of the most radical democrats, already known by the 
name of “ revolutionaries.” 
His university studies finished, he took up his abode on 
the banks of the Rhine, and continued the works he had 
begun. He had conceived the project of writing the history, 
of the Ionic school of ancient philosophy; and in order to 
collect materials, and also to breathe the air of the great city 
* The Jews have been nearly everywhere the initiators or the propa 
gators of Socialism. The reason is plain. Socialism is an energetic protest 
against the iniquitous basis of the actual order of things, and an ardent 
aspiration towards a better system where justice would reign supreme 
Now this IS precisely the foundation of the Judaism of Job and th¿ 
i rophets, and of that aspiration towards a Messiah whence Christianity 
aro^. M, Renan shows this clearly in the preface of his recent translation 
ol Rcclesiastes. 
“ The Jew is not resigned like the Christian. To the Christian, poverty 
and humility are virtues, while to the Jew they are misfortunes o be 
avoided. Abuse and violence, which hnd the Christian calm, enrage the 
Jew. Hence it is that the Israelite element has in our time become an in- 
nuence of reform and prepress in all countries where it is to be found. The 
pamt-bimonism and the industrial and financial mysticism of our days are, 
^ part at least, derived from it. In the revolutionary movements of 
f ranee, the Jewish element played an important part.” 
In the Jewish conception of the world, it is here below that the greatest 
possible amount of justice should be realized. From which it follows that 
present social arrangements should be at all hazards radically changed.