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savagery and barbarism, by the abolition of slavery and serfdom. Then, however feeble at that moment were the claims of the German proletariat to a place of historic importance, they were not entirely lacking. The history of this proletariat since the French Revolution had not been an utter blank. And especially by its sympathy for the emancipatory action of the French proletariat, the workmen of the Parisian section on the 14th of July, the 5th and 6th of October, and the 10th of August,[1] it shared in the title to historical consideration won by the French proletariat; a title that had become universal in character, just as the Declaration of the Rights of Man was a universal symbol and as the fall of the Bastille was a universal deliverance. At the very moment when Marx was writing to the German proletariat words

    as bare necessities for existence, or, which is the same thing, upon the excess of the means of satisfaction over the lowest limit of what the custom of the period demands as bare necessaries for existence.' 'If you then compare,' he suggests further, 'what the rich class has to-day with what the working class has to-day, the gap between the working class and the rich class to-day is evidently greater than ever before.' That is the pith of the Theory of Increasing Misery."—Modern Socialism, edited by R. C. K. Ensor.

  1. The 14th of July, 1789, is the date of the fall of the Bastille; on the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, the people of Paris, led by the hungry women, forced the King to return from Versailles; on the 10th of August, 1792, the Tuileries were taken.