Therefore, do away with the first chamber. There is but one people, not a first and a second, and they need but one house for their representation. This house, let it be a simple, noble building, with an elevated roof, resting on tall and strong pillars. Why would you disfigure the building by dividing it with a mean partition, thus causing two confined spaces?
We further insist upon the unconditional right of every natural-born subject, when of age, to a vote. The more needy he be, the more his right, and the more earnestly will he aid in keeping the laws which he himself assisted in framing and which, henceforth, are to protect him from any similar future state of need and misery. Our republican programme further includes a new system of national defence, in which every citizen capable of bearing arms shall be enrolled. No standing army. It shall be neither a standing army nor a militia, nor yet a reduction of the one nor an increase of the other. It must be a new creation, which in its process of development, will do away with the necessity of a standing army as well as a militia.
And when all who draw breath in our dear German land are united into one great free people, when class prejudices shall have ceased to exist, then do you suppose we have reached our goal? Oh, no; we are just equipped for the beginning. Then will it be our duty to investigate boldly, with all our reasoning power, the cause of misery of our present social status, and determine whether man, the crown of creation, with his high mental abilities and his wonderful physical development, can have been destined by God to be the servile slave of inert base metal. We must decide whether money shall exert such degrading power over the image of God--man--as to render him the despicable slave of the passions of usury and avarice. The war against this existing evil will cause neither tears nor blood. The result of the foregone victory will be a universal conviction that the highest attainable happiness is commonwealth, a state in which as many active men as Mother Earth can supply with food will join in the well-ordered republic, supporting it by a fair exchange of labor, mutually supplying each other’s wants, and contributing to the universal happiness. Society must be in a diseased state when the activity of individuals is restrained and the existing laws imperfectly administered. In the coming contest we shall find that society will be maintained by the physical activity of individuals, and we shall destroy the nebulous notion that money possesses any inherent power. And heaven will help us to discover the true law by which this shall be proved, and dispel the false halo with which the unthinking mind invests this demon money. Then shall we root out the miseries engendered and nourished by public and secret usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations. This will tend to promote the emancipation of the human race (whilst fulfilling the teachings of Christ, a simple and clear truism which it is ever sought to hide behind the glamour of dogma, once invented to appeal to the feeble understanding of simple-minded barbarians), and to prepare it for a state towards the highest development of which we are now tending with clear vision and reason.