So much as to what you must do from a political point of view.

Now for the social question which you raise, a question which rightly interests you to a still greater extent.

I have read in the papers, not without a sad smile, that part of the program for your Congress consists in debates concerning freedom of choosing places of residence and of employment for the workingman.

What, Gentlemen, are you going to debate about the right of choosing places of residence, the right of settling down anywhere without being specially taxed!

I can answer you on this point with nothing better than Schiller’s epigram: 

   Jahre lang schon bedien’ ich mich meiner Nase zum Riechen:  Aber
  hab’ ich an sie auch ein erweisliches Recht?

  (Year after year I have used the nose God gave me to smell with: 
  But can I legally prove any such right to its use?)

And is not the situation the same as to freedom of employment?

All these debates have at least one mistake—­they come more than fifty years too late.  Freedom of moving about and freedom of employment are things which nowadays are decreed in a legislative body in silence, but no longer debated.

Should the German working class repeat again the spectacle of assemblies whose enjoyment consists in giving themselves over to long purposeless speeches and applauding them?  The seriousness and the energy of the German working class will know how to protect it from such a pitiable spectacle.

But you propose to establish institutions for savings, funds for retiring pensions, insurance against accidents and sickness?  I am willing to recognize the relative usefulness of these institutions, although it is a subordinate one and hardly worth notice.

But let us make a complete distinction between two questions which have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Is it your object to make the misery of individual workingmen more endurable; to counteract the effects of thoughtlessness, sickness, old age, accidents of all kinds, through which by chance or necessity individual workingmen are forced even below the normal condition of the working class?  For such objects all these institutions are entirely appropriate means.  Only it would not be worth while in that case to begin a movement for such a purpose throughout all Germany, to stir up a general agitation in the whole working class of the nation.  You must not bring mountains into labor in order that a ridiculous mouse appear.  This so extremely limited and subordinate purpose can better be left to local unions and local organizations, which can always handle it far better.

Or is this your object:  To improve the normal condition of the whole working class and elevate it above its present level?  In truth this is and must be your purpose, but this sharp line of distinction is necessary, which I have drawn between these two objects, which must not be confused with each other, in order to show you, better than I could through a long exposition, how utterly powerless these institutions are to attain this second object, and therefore how utterly outside the scope of the present workingmen’s movement.