“O worthy Sir!  Think better of the sword! 
A sword, when swung in freedom’s sacred cause,
Becomes the Holy Word, of which you preach,
The God, incarnate in reality.
* * * * *
And all great things, which e’er will come to pass
Will owe their final being to the sword.”

In short, Lassalle was not by nature a man of the study.  He was a man of the battlefield.

The hour for battle was fast approaching.  In 1859 the alliance of Napoleon the Third and Cavour against the Austrians was consummated and the war for the liberation and unification of Italy began.  The hopes of all true Germans for the unification of the Fatherland took new life.  Especially the survivors of ’48 felt their pulses quicken.  In 1859 Lassalle revealed his own interest in contemporary politics by the publication of his pamphlet on The Italian War and the Duty of Prussia, and in the following year by his address on Fichte’s Political Legacy and Our Own Times.  He also planned to establish a popular newspaper in Berlin, but the scheme was abandoned in 1861, on account of the refusal of the Prussian government to sanction the naturalization of the man whom Lassalle desired for his associate in the enterprise, Karl Marx.  With the Prince of Prussia’s accession to the throne and the brilliant successes of the Progressive party in the Prussian elections, men instinctively felt that the times were big with portentous events.

Lassalle’s political ideas were already well developed.  He was born a democrat.  In early nineteenth-century England the young Disraeli could hopefully plan a different course, but Lassalle in Prussia could look for no public career as an aristocrat.  Under the circumstances to be a democrat meant also to be a republican, and, if need be, a revolutionist.  As a youth he drank deep from the idealistic springs that inspired the republican party throughout Germany.  He admired Schiller and Fichte and, above all, Heine and Boerne.  Lassalle indeed had drunk deeper than most of the revolutionists of ’48.  He was not only a democrat and a republican; he was also a socialist.  Even before his first visit to Paris he had become acquainted with the writings of St. Simon, Fourier, and the utopian socialists in general.  His mind was ripe for the doctrines of the Communist Manifesto, when that epoch-making document appeared, but he does not seem to have become personally acquainted with Marx until his connection with the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the fall of 1848.  From that time on till the foundation of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein Lassalle stood closer to Marx than to any other one man.