Observe, at the same time, Gentlemen, the peculiar contradiction and the strange kind of justice of the procedure of laying the whole expense upon indirect taxation, and therefore upon the poor people, and of setting up as a test and a condition of the franchise, and therefore of political control, the direct taxes, which contribute for the total need of the State only the insignificant sum of twelve million out of one hundred and eight million.

I said further with reference to the nobility of the Middle Ages, that they held in contempt all activity and industry of the commoners.  The situation is the same today.  All kinds of work, to be sure, are equally esteemed today, and if anybody became a millionaire by rag-picking he would be sure of obtaining a highly esteemed position in society.

But what social contempt falls upon those who, no matter at what they labor or how hard they toil, have no capital to back them—­that is a matter which you, Gentlemen, do not need to be told by me, but can find often enough, unfortunately, in your daily life.  Indeed, in many respects, the capitalist class asserts the supremacy of its special privilege with even stricter consistency than the nobility of the Middle Ages did with its land ownership.  The instruction of the people—­I mean here of the adult people—­was in the Middle Ages the work of the clergy.  Since then the newspapers have assumed this function; but through the securities a newspaper must give, and still more through the stamp tax which is laid in our country, as in France and elsewhere, on newspapers, a daily newspaper has become a very expensive institution, which cannot be established without very considerable capital, with the result that, for this very reason, even the opportunity to mold public opinion, instruct it, and guide it has become the privilege of the capitalist class.

Were this not the case, you would have much different and very much better papers.  It is interesting to see how early this attempt of the bourgeoisie to make the press a privilege of capital appears, and in what frank and undisguised form.  On July 24, 1789, a few days after the capture of the Bastille, during the first days after the middle class obtained political supremacy, the representatives of the city of Paris passed a resolution by which they declared printers responsible if they published pamphlets or sheets by writers sans existence connue (without visible means of support).  The newly won freedom of the press, then, was to exist only for writers who had visible means of support.  Property thus appears as the condition of the freedom of the press, indeed of the morality of the writer.  The straightforwardness of the first days of citizen sovereignty only expresses in a childishly frank manner what is today artfully obtained by bonding and stamp taxes.  With these main characteristic facts corresponding to our consideration of the Middle Ages we shall have to be satisfied here.