workshops to Louis Blane and his Socialist friends. It is true that the Socialists made the opening of the workshops imperative, but the Minister responsible for them deliberately designed their collapse because he was a bitter opponent of Louis Blane. Mr. Kirkup, one of the most impartial and painstaking of inquirers, wrote: "It is perfectly clear that the national workshops were simply a travesty of the proposals of Louis Blane, established expressly to discredit them";[1] and it was regarding the tales spread about them that Lassalle exclaimed: "Lying is a European power." Louis Blane repudiated them. There are some events in history about which popular opinion comes to a conclusion, wrong as wrong can be, but the opinion is circulated, is reiterated, is persisted in until it becomes an unquestioned assumption, and it can be removed after that only by the most patient and laborious campaign of—telling the truth. Such an event is the failure of the National Workshops of Paris. The French Socialist movement had to bow to the opposition of popular ignorance and become silent on the Right to Work for a long time.
A similar untoward fate befell it in Germany. The Liberal individualists there adopted it as a cardinal article of their faith. In the Prussian Civil Code of the 5th of February, 1794, it was embodied, but in administration it proved to be but a constitutional provision for poor law relief. The English workhouse and stoneyard were what the Prussian
- ↑ History of Socialism, pp. 48, 49.
