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  propagators ­
  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  innuence
  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.