The laborer is counted as the most material and egoistical man. He does nothing at all _for humanity_, does everything for _himself_, for his welfare.
The commonalty, because it proclaimed the freedom of _Man_ only as to his birth, had to leave him in the claws of the un-human man (the egoist) for the rest of life. Hence under the _régime_ of political liberalism egoism has an immense field for free utilization.
The laborer will _utilize_ society for his _egoistic_ ends as the commoner does the State. You have only an egoistic end after all, your welfare! is the humane liberal's reproach to the Socialist; take up a _purely human interest_, then I will be your companion. "But to this there belongs a consciousness stronger, more comprehensive, than a _laborer-consciousness_." "The laborer makes nothing, therefore he has nothing; but he makes nothing because his labor is always a labor that remains individual, calculated strictly for his own want, a labor day by day."[84] In opposition to this one might, for instance, consider the fact that Gutenberg's labor did not remain individual, but begot innumerable children, and still lives to-day; it was calculated for the want of humanity, and was an eternal, imperishable labor.
The humane consciousness despises the commoner-consciousness as well as the laborer-consciousness: for the commoner is "indignant" only at vagabonds (at all who have "no definite occupation") and their "immorality"; the laborer is "disgusted" by the _idler_ ("lazybones") and his "immoral," because parasitic and unsocial, principles. To this the humane liberal retorts: The unsettledness of many is only your product, Philistine! But that you, proletarian, demand the _grind_ of all, and want to make _drudgery_ general, is a part, still clinging to you, of your pack-mule life up to this time. Certainly you want to lighten drudgery itself by _all_ having to drudge equally hard, yet only for this reason, that all may gain _leisure_ to an equal extent. But what are they to do with their leisure? What does your "society" do, that this leisure may be passed _humanly_? It must leave the gained leisure to egoistic preference again, and the very _gain_ that your society furthers falls to the egoist, as the gain of the commonalty, the _masterlessness of man_, could not be filled with a human element by the State, and therefore was left to arbitrary choice.