London, Wednesday, December 1, 1852 

You will have ere this received by the European papers numerous 
reports of the Communist Monster Trial at Cologne, Prussia, and of 
its result. But as none of the reports is anything like a faithful 
statement of the facts, and as these facts throw a glaring light upon 
the political means by which the Continent of Europe is kept in 
bondage, I consider it necessary to revert to this trial. 

The Communist or Proletarian party, as well as other parties, had 
lost, by suppression of the rights of association and meeting, the 
means of giving to itself a legal organization on the Continent. Its 
leaders, besides, had been exiled from their countries. But no 
political party can exist without an organization; and that organiza- 
tion which both the Liberal bourgeois and the Democratic shopkeep- 
ing class were enabled more or less to supply by the social station, 
advantages, and long-established, everyday intercourse of their 
members, the proletarian class, without such social station and 
pecuniary means, was necessarily compelled to seek in secret 
association. Hence, both in France and Germany, sprang up those 
numerous secret societies which have, ever since 1849, one after 
another been discovered by the police and prosecuted as con- 
' spiracies; but if many of them were really conspiracies, formed with 
the actual intention of upsetting the Government for the time 
being—and he is a coward that under certain circumstances would 
not conspire, just as he is a fool who, under other circumstances, 
would do so—there were some other societies which were formed 
with a wider and more elevated purpose, which knew, that the 
upsetting of an existing Government was but a passing stage in the 
great impending struggle, and which intended to keep together and 
to prepare the party, whose nucleus they formed, for the last, 

decisive combat which must one day or another crush forever in 
Europe the domination, not of mere “tyrants,” “despots” and 
“usurpers,” but of a power far superior, and far more formidable 
than theirs; that of capital over labor. 

The organization of the advanced Communist party in Ger- 
many*” was of this kind. In accordance with the principles of its 
“Manifesto” (published in 1848) and with those explained in the 
series of articles on Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,’ 
published in The New-York Daily Tribune, this party never imagined 
itself capable of producing, at any time and at its pleasure, that 
revolution which was to carry its ideas into practice. It studied the 
causes that had produced the revolutionary movements of 1848, and 
the causes that made them fail. Recognizing the social antagonism of 
classes at the bottom of all political struggles, it applied itself to the 
study of the conditions under which one class of society can and must 
be called on to represent the whole of the interests of a nation, and 
thus politically to rule over it. History showed to the Communist 
party, how, after the landed aristocracy of the Middle Ages, the 
monied power of the first capitalists arose and seized the reins of 
Government; how the social influence and political rule of this 
financial section of capitalists was superseded by the rising strength, 
since the introduction of steam, of the manufacturing capitalists, and 
how at the present moment two more classes claim their turn of 
domination, the petty trading class, and the industrial working class. 
The practical revolutionary experience of 1848-49 confirmed the 
reasonings of theory, which led to the conclusion that the democracy 
of the petty traders must first have its turn, before the Communist 
working class could hope to permanently establish itself in power 
and destroy that system of wages-slavery which keeps it under the 
yoke of the bourgeoisie. Thus the secret organization of the 
Communists could not have the direct purpose of upsetting the 
present governments of Germany. Being formed to upset not these, 
but the insurrectionary government, which is sooner or later to 
follow them, its members might, and certainly would, individually 
lend an active hand to a revolutionary movement against the present 
status quo in its time; but the preparation of such a movement, 
otherwise than by secret spreading of Communist opinions by the 
masses, could not be an object of the Association.” So well was this 
foundation of the society understood by the majority of its members, 
that when the place-hunting ambition of some tried to turn it into a 

conspiracy for making an ex tempore revolution, ey were speedily 
turned out. 

Now, according to no law upon the face of the erie could such an 
association be called a plot, a conspiracy for purposes of high 
treason. If it was a conspiracy, it was one against, not the existing 
Government, but its probable successors. And the Prussian Govern- 
ment was aware of it. That was the cause why the eleven defendants 
were kept in solitary confinement during eighteen months, spent, on 
the part of the authorities, in the strangest judicial feats. Imagine, 
that after eight months’ detention, the prisoners were remanded for 
some months more, “there being no evidence of any crime against 
them!” And when at last they were brought before a jury, there was 
not a single overt act of a treasonable nature proved against them. 
And yet they were convicted, and you will speedily see how. 

One of the emissaries of the society* was arrested in May, 1851, 
and from documents found upon him, other arrests followed. A 
Prussian police officer, a certain Stieber, was immediately ordered to 
trace the ramifications, in London, of the pretended plot. He 
succeeded in obtaining some papers connected with the above- 
mentioned seceders from the society, who had, after being turned 
out, formed an actual conspiracy in Paris and London. These papers 
were obtained by a double crime. A man named Reuter was bribed to 
break open the writing desk of the secretary of the society,” and steal 
the papers therefrom. But that was nothing yet. This theft led to the 
discovery and conviction of the so-called Franco-German plot, in 
Paris,”*’ but it gave no clue as to the great Communist Association. 
The Paris plot, we may as well here observe, was under the direction 
of a few ambitious imbeciles and political chevaliers d’industrie in 
London, and of a formerly convicted forger, then acting as a police 
spy in Paris’; their dupes made up, by rapid declamations and 
blood-thirsty rantings, for the utter insignificance of their political 
existence. 

The Prussian police, then, had to look out for fresh discoveries. 
They established a regular office of secret police at the Prussian 
Embassy in London. A police agent, Greif by name, held his odious 
vocation under the title of an attaché to the Embassy—a step which 
would suffice to put all Prussian Embassies out of the pale of 
international law, and which even the Austrians have not yet dared © 

to take. Under him worked a certain Fleury, a merchant in the City 
of London, a man of some fortune and rather respectably connected, 
one of those low creatures who do the basest actions from an innate 
inclination to infamy. Another agent was a commercial clerk named 
Hirsch, who, however, had already been denounced as a spy on his 
arrival. He introduced himself into the society of some German 
Communist refugees in London, and they, in order to obtain proofs 
of his real character, admitted him for a short time. The proofs of his 
connection with the police were very soon obtained, and Mr. Hirsch, 
from that time, absented himself. Although, however, he thus 
resigned all opportunities of gaining the information he was paid to 
procure, he was not inactive. From his retreat in Kensington, where 
he never met one of the Communists in question, he manufactured 
every week pretended reports of pretended sittings of a pretended 
Central Committee of that very conspiracy which the Prussian police 
could not get hold of. The contents of these reports were of the most 
absurd nature; not a Christian name was correct, not a name 
correctly spelt, not a single individual made to speak as he would be 
likely to speak. His master, Fleury, assisted him in this forgery, and it 
is not yet proved that “Attaché” Greif can wash his hands of these 
infamous proceedings. The Prussian Government, incredible to say, 
took these silly fabrications for gospel truth, and you may imagine 
what a confusion such depositions created in the evidence to be 
brought before the jury. When the trial came on, Mr. Stieber, the 
already mentioned police officer, got into the witness-box, swore to 
all these absurdities, and, with no little self-complacency, maintained 
that he had a secret agent in the very closest intimacy with those 
parties in London who were considered the prime movers in this 
awful conspiracy. This secret agent was very secret indeed, for he 
had hid his face for eight months in Kensington, for fear he might 
actually see one of the parties whose most secret thoughts, words and 
doings he pretended to report week after week. 

Messrs. Hirsch and Fleury, however, had another invention in 
store. They worked up the whole of the reports they had made into 
an “original Minute Book” of the sittings of the secret supreme 
committee, whose existence was maintained by the Prussian police; 
and Mr. Stieber, finding that this book wondrously agreed with the 
reports already received from the same parties, at once laid it before 
the jury, declaring upon his oath that after serious examination and 
according to his fullest conviction that book was genuine. It was then 
that most of the absurdities reported by Hirsch were made public. 
You may imagine the surprise of the pretended members of that 
secret committee when they found things stated of them which they 

never knew before. Some who were baptized William, were here 
christened Louis or Charles; others, at the time they were at the 
other end of England, were made to have pronounced speeches in 
London; others were reported to have read letters they never had 
received; they were made to have met regularly on a Thursday, 
when they used to have a convivial reunion, once a week, on 
Wednesdays; a working man, who could hardly write, figured as one 
of the takers of minutes and signed as such; and they all of them 
were made to speak in a language which, if it may be that of Prussian 
police stations, was certainly not that of a reunion in which literary 
men, favorably known in their country, formed the majority. And, to 
crown the whole, a receipt was forged for a sum of money, 
pretended to have been paid by the fabricators to the pretended 
secretary of the fictitious Central Committee for this book; but the 
existence of this pretended secretary rested merely upon a hoax that 
some malicious Communist had played upon the unfortunate 
Hirsch. 

This clumsy fabrication was too scandalous an affair not to 
produce the contrary of its intended effect. Although the London 
friends of the defendants were deprived of all means to bring the 
facts of the case before the jury—although the letters they sent to 
the counsel for the defense were suppressed by the post—although 
the documents and affidavits they succeeded in getting into the 
hands of these legal gentlemen were not admitted in evidence, yet 
the general indignation was such that even the public accusers,’ nay, 
even Mr. Stieber—whose oath had been given as a guarantee for the 
authenticity of that book—were compelled to recognize it as a 
forgery. 

This forgery, however, was not the only thing of the kind of which 
the police was guilty. Two or three more cases of the sort came out 
during the trial. The documents stolen by Reuter were interpolated 
by the police so as to disfigure their meaning. A paper, containing 
some rabid nonsense, was written in a handwriting imitating that of 
Dr. Marx, and for a time it was pretended that it had been written by 
him, until at last the prosecution was obliged to acknowledge the 
forgery. But for every police infamy that was proved as such, there 
were five or six fresh ones brought forward, which could not, at the 
moment, be unveiled, the defense being taken by surprise, the 
proofs having to be got from London, and every correspondence of 
the counsel for the defense with the London Communist refugees 
being in open court treated as complicity in the alleged plot! 

That Greif and Fleury are what they are here represented to be 
has been stated by Mr. Stieber himself, in his evidence; as to Hirsch, 
he has before a London magistrate confessed that he forged the 
“Minute Book” by order and with the assistance of Fleury, and then 
made his escape from this country in order to evade a criminal 
prosecution. 

The Government could stand few such branding disclosures as 
came to light during the trial. It had a jury such as the Rhenish 
Province had not yet seen. Six nobles, of the purest reactionist water, 
four Lords of Finance, two Government officials. These were not the 
men to look closely into the confused mass of evidence heaped 
before them during six weeks, when they heard it continually dinned 
into their ears that the defendants were the chiefs of a dreadful 
Communist conspiracy, got up in order to subvert everything 
sacred — property, family, religion, order, government and law! And 
yet, had not the Government, at the same time, brought it to the 
knowledge of the privileged classes, that an acquittal in this trial 
would be the signal for the suppression of the jury; and that it would 
be taken as a direct political demonstration—as a proof of the 
middle-class liberal opposition being ready to unite even with the 
most extreme revolutionists—the verdict would have been an 
acquittal. As it was, the retroactive application of the new Prussian 
code enabled the Government to have seven prisoners convicted, 
while four merely were acquitted, and those convicted were 
sentenced to imprisonment varying from three to six years,” as you 
have, doubtless, already stated at the time the news reached you. 

Written about November 29, 1852 Reproduced from the New-York