they do today, would maintain their individual liberty, individual manner of living, and individual compensation for work, and would stand in no different relation to the State, except that the necessary capital, or credit, for their association would be provided for them by it.  But that is exactly the office and the destiny of the State—­to make easy and provide means for the great cultural progress of humanity.  This is its ultimate purpose.  For this it exists.  It has always served this purpose and always must.

I will give you a single example among hundreds—­the canals, highways, postoffices, steamboat lines, telegraph lines, banking institutions, agricultural improvements, the introduction of new branches of industry, etc., in all of which the intervention of the State was necessary—­a single example, but one which is worth a hundred others, and one which is especially near at hand.  When railroads were to be built, in all German as well as in all foreign states except in some few isolated lines, the State had to intervene in one way or another—­chiefly by undertaking to guarantee at least the dividends on the stock, in many countries going much further than this.

The guarantee of dividends constitutes a one-sided contract of the rich stockholder with the State—­namely, if the new enterprises are unprofitable, then the loss falls upon the State, and consequently upon all taxpayers, and, consequently again, especially upon you, Gentlemen, upon the great class of the propertyless.  If, on the other hand, the new enterprises are profitable, then the profit, the large dividends, come to us, the rich stockholders, and this is not obviated by the fact that in many countries—­for instance in Prussia—­certain very uncertain advantages for the State in a very distant future are stipulated, advantages which would result much sooner and much more abundantly from an association of the working class.

Without this intervention of the State, of which, as I have said, the guarantee of dividends was the weakest form, we should perhaps have no railroads on the whole continent today.

The fact is also unquestionable that the State was obliged to take this step; that the guarantee of dividends was a most pronounced intervention of the State, that, furthermore, this intervention took place in favor of the rich and well-to-do class, which also controls all capital and all credit, and which therefore could dispense with the intervention of the State far more easily than you; and that this intervention was called for by the whole capitalist class.

Why then did not a cry arise at that time against the guarantee of dividends as an inadmissible intervention of the State?  Why was it not then discovered that by this guarantee the social incentive of the rich managers of those stock companies was threatened?  Why was this guarantee of the State not decried as Socialism and Communism?

But forsooth, this intervention of the State was in the interests of the rich and well-to-do classes of society, and in that case it is entirely admissible and always has been!  It is only when there is any question of intervention in favor of the poverty-stricken classes, in favor of the infinite majority, then it is “pure Socialism and Communism.”