charge in season to join the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and in the spring of 1849 he completed his apprenticeship as a revolutionist with a term in jail.  At the expiration of his sentence he returned to the cause of the Countess, but he was required by the Prussian government to keep away from Berlin.  Not until 1857, through the intervention of A. von Humboldt, did he receive permission to resume his residence in the capital.  Then, with his friend, the Countess, he settled down once more to the realization of his youthful dreams, and the long-deferred career was taken up in earnest.

Lassalle’s career as a scholar and man of learning was short, but productive.  It was opened in 1857 with the publication of his work, the Philosophy of Heraclitus, projected more than ten years before, and it was concluded in 1861, as the event proved, by the publication of his System of the Acquired Rights.  Midway between the two appeared a dramatic composition, Franz von Sickingen, which served both as an intellectual diversion from the more serious studies in philosophy and law and as a personal confession of faith on the part of the author.  None of these works can be pronounced an unqualified success.  The philosophy of Heraclitus was too obscure to exert any great influence upon contemporary thought, even when expounded by a Lassalle, and the philosophy of Lassalle himself was too closely modeled upon that of his master, Hegel, to obtain much notice on its own account.  The treatise on the acquired rights of man was too technical to attract popular attention and too unorthodox to receive the general approval of professional students of the law.  The Franz von Sickingen was too deficient in dramatic action to be presented on the stage and too artificial in literary form to be read in the library.  The three productions secured for Lassalle a position among scholars but brought him no general recognition.

The three productions, however, pour a flood of light upon Lassalle’s own powerful personality.  In the Philosophy of Heraclitus he grappled with the most formidable philosophical problems and showed himself a master of the Hegelian dialectic.  In the System of the Acquired Rights he attacked the very foundations of the current theories of law and justice with the same concentration of energy and purpose as had been displayed in the more practical problems of law and justice involved in the case of the Countess von Hatzfeld.  But it is in Franz von Sickingen that Lassalle expressed his own nature most clearly and most completely.  Here indeed he speaks directly for himself through the lips of Ulrich von Hutten.  Passage after passage springs from the soul of the living Lassalle, the same Lassalle that in his boyhood dreams would emancipate the Jews by force of arms, that in his early manhood so deeply impressed Heine, and that so shortly afterwards was ready to defy all the powers of the kingdom in defence of a friendless woman.  The following speech of the legendary von Hutten is characteristic of the real Lassalle: