Thus the State’s duty towards capital was com¬ paratively simple and clear. It merely had to see that capital remained the servant of the State and did not contemplate obtaining control of the nation. In taking this attitude the State could confine itself to two objects : maintenance of efficient national and independent administration on the one hand, and of the social rights of the workers on the other. I had been unable before then to distinguish as clearly as I should have liked between capital, purely the final outcome of creative labour, and capital which owned its existence exclu¬ sively to speculation. I had not known how to start thinking about it.
The subject was now being dealt with exhaustively by one of the various lecturers in the course which I mentioned above—Gottfried Feder.
Immediately after listening to Feder’s first lecture, the idea entered my brain that I had at last discovered the road to one of the essential principles on which a new Party might be founded.
I recognized at once that it was a question here of a theoretic truth which would be of immense importance to the future of the German nation. The sharp sever¬ ance of Stock Exchange capital from the finances of the nation offered a possibility of combating inter¬ nationalization of Germany’s financial administration, without having to threaten the principle of an indepen¬ dent national existence with a struggle against capital. Germany’s development was too clearly before my eyes for me not to be aware that the hardest fight would have to be fought out not against the enemy nations but against international capital. Feder’s lecture gave me a splendid war-cry for the coming struggle.
In this case also later developments have proved how correct our feeling was at that period. We are no longer derided by our foolish bourgeois politicians ; even they realize to-day, unless they lie in their throats, that international capital was not only the greatest of war-agitators, but that,