Their economic situation necessarily breeds in these classes an instinctive sense that the function of the State is and must be that of helping the individual, through the combined efforts of all, to reach a development such as the individual in isolation is incapable of attaining.

In point of fact, however, this ethical conception of the State does not set up any concept that has not already previously been the real motor principle in the State.  On the contrary, it is plain from what has already been said, that this, in an unconscious way, has been the essential nature of the State from the beginning.  This essential character of the State has always in some measure asserted itself through the logical constraint of the course of events, even when such an aim has been absent from the conscious purposes of the State, even when opposed to the will of those in whose hands the power of control had rested.

In setting up this conception of the working classes as the dominant concept of the State, therefore, we do nothing more than articularly formulate what has all along, but obscurely, been the organic nature of the State, and bring it into the foreground as the consciously avowed end of society.

Herein lies the comprehensive unity and continuity of all human development, that nothing drops into the course of development from the outside.  It is only that that is brought clearly into consciousness, and worked out on the ground of free choice, which has in substance all along constituted the obscurely and unconsciously effective organic nature of things.

With the French Revolution of 1848 this clearer consciousness has made its entry upon the scene and has been proclaimed.  In the first place, this outcome was symbolically represented in that a workman was made a member of the provisional government; and, further, there was proclaimed universal, equal and direct suffrage, which is in point of method the means whereby this conception of the State is to be realized.  February, 1848, therefore, marks the dawning of the historical period in which the ethical principle of the working classes is consciously accepted as the guiding principle of society.

We have reason to congratulate ourselves upon living in an epoch consecrated to the achievement of this exalted end.  But, above all, it is to be said, since it is the destined course of this historical period to make their conception the guiding principle of society, it behooves the working classes to conduct themselves with all moral earnestness, sobriety and studious deliberation.

Such, expressed in the briefest terms, is the content and the course of argument of the disquisition in question.

What I have sought to accomplish in that argument is nothing else than to explain to my auditors the intrinsic philosophical content of the historical development, to initiate them into this most difficult of all the sciences, to bring home to them the fact that history is a logical whole which unfolds step by step under the guidance of inexorable laws.