It was not the workingmen but the middle-class Progressive party that was most aroused by Lassalle’s Open Letter. He was regarded as a traitor to the cause of the constitution and a practical ally of the forces of reaction—­in short, as either a fool or a knave.  Lassalle saw clearly enough that he could not succeed without making clear to his prospective followers the irreconcilability of liberalism and socialism, and directed his most powerful efforts against the position of the Progressive party.  His Workingmen’s Reader (May, 1863) and Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch (January, 1864) are conspicuous memorials of his campaign against liberalism.  The liberal position was substantially that the workingmen, though without effective voting-power, were honorary members of the Progressive party, and hence needed no independent party of their own, and that, for the rest, they could best promote their special economic interests by “self-help,” that is, through voluntary and unassisted cooeperation.  Liberal leaders, especially Schulze-Delitzsch, labored strenuously to improve the well-being of the working-classes along these lines, and their efforts were not in vain.  The Progressive watchword, “right makes might,” sophistical as it seemed to Lassalle, appealed to the idealism of the German people, and the party was in the heyday of its success.  More and more Lassalle found himself forced by the necessities of his struggle with the Progressives into compromising relations with the government of Bismarck.  His last great speech delivered at Ronsdorf on the first anniversary of the foundation of the Workingmen’s Association betrays the dilemma into which he had fallen.  Under the conditions of the time there was not enough room between the contending forces of progress and reaction for the great independent labor party which Lassalle had hoped to create.  There was room for a humble beginning, but that was all.

It is not necessary to dwell on the details of Lassalle’s last twelve months and tragic end.  The story is brief:  a year of exhausting toil and small result, then a short vacation, an unfortunate love-affair, a foolish challenge to a duel, a single pistol-shot, and three days later, August 31, 1864, the end.  Thus he died, and on his tomb in Breslau was written:  “Here lies what was mortal of Ferdinand Lassalle, the Thinker and Fighter.”

The name of Lassalle is most frequently connected with that of Marx.  Certainly the two had much in common.  They worked together in 1848 and would have done so again in 1862 if Lassalle had had his way.  For fourteen years they were personal friends.  Though they ultimately drifted apart, they never became enemies.  Lassalle was seven years younger than Marx and was unquestionably strongly influenced by the ideas of the founder of scientific socialism.  At the same time he was a man who did his own thinking, and his speeches and writings, even those dealing most particularly with the philosophy of socialism,