op
progressively and to rise above its own level or to sink deeper and
deeper into the mire of insignificance and weakness in which it
already stands knee deep; these must be the straightforward tactics of
the German workingmen's party with reference to the Progressive party.

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 appropr