opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. It was the Equites, the big-money party, which made Tiberius Gracchus' s popular movement possible at all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and the movement collapsed. Cæsar and Crassus financed the Catilinarian movement, and so directed it against the Senatorial party instead of against property. In England politicians of eminence laid it down as early as 1700 that "on Change one deals in votes as well as in stocks, and the price of a vote is as well known as the price of an acre of land."[1] When the news of Waterloo reached Paris, the price of French government stock rose[2] — the Jacobins had destroyed the old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it stepped forward as lord of the land.[3] There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money — and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.[4] Intellect rejects, money directs — so it runs in every last act of a Culture-drama, when the megalopolis has become master over the rest. And, in the limit, intellect has no cause of complaint. For, after all, it has won its victory — namely, in its own realm of truths, the realm of books and ideals that is not of this world. Its conceptions have become venerabilia of the beginning Civilization. But Money wins, through these very concepts, in its realm, which is only of this world.
In the Western world of States, it was in England that both sides of Third-Estate politics, the ideal and the real, graduated. Here alone it was possible for the Third Estate to avoid the necessity of marching against an absolute State in order to destroy it and set up its own dominion on the ruins. For here it could grow up into the strong form of the First Estate, where it found a fully developed form of interest-politics, and from whose methods it could borrow for its own purposes a traditional tactic such as it could hardly wish to improve
- ↑ J. Hatschek, Engl. Verfassungsgesch., p. 588.
- ↑ On the other side of the Channel, it is well known that the Rothschild fortune was founded in a dramatic play upon the varying news from the front in Belgium.
In the second phase of the Franco-German War of 1870-1 the bankers of Frankfurt took up holdings in the loans floated by the French Government of National Defence. — Tr.
- ↑ But even during the Reign of Terror in the middle of Paris, there flourished the establishment of Dr. Belhomme, in which members of the highest aristocracy ate and drank and danced out of all danger for so long as they could pay (G. Lenôtre, Das revolutionäre Paris, p. 409).
- ↑ The great movement which makes use of the catchwords of Marx has not delivered the entrepreneur into the power of the worker, but both into that of the Bourse.
