Sir.— We embrace the occasion of your splendid success at the 
Nottingham election to congratulate you, and through you the 
English Chartists, on this signal victory. We consider the defeat of a 
Free-Trade minister ? at the show of hands by an enormous Chartist 
majority, and at the very time, too, when Free-Trade principles are 
triumphant in the Legislature,4”7 we consider this, Sir, as a sign that 
the working classes of England are very well aware of the position 
they have to take after the triumph of Free Trade. We conclude 
from this fact that they know very well that now, when the middle 
classes have carried their chief measure, when they have only to 
replace the present weak go-between cabinet by an energetical, really 
middle-class ministry, in order to be the acknowledged ruling class of 
your country, that now the great struggle of capital and labour, of 
bourgeois and proletarian must come to a decision. The ground is 
now cleared by the retreat of the landed aristocracy from the contest; 
middle class and working class are the only classes betwixt whom 
there can be a possible struggle. The contending parties have their 
respective battle-cries forced upon them by their interests and 

mutual position:—the middle class— “extension of commerce by 
any means whatsoever, and a ministry of Lancashire cotton-lords to 
carry this out”; —the working class — ‘‘a democratic reconstruction 

of the Constitution upon the basis of the People’s Charter”,** by 
which the working class will become the ruling class of England. We 

* John Cam Hobhouse.— Ed. 

Address of German Democratic Communists of Brussels to O’Connor = 59 

rejoice to see the English working men fully aware of this altered 
state of parties; of the new period Chartist agitation has entered into 
with the final defeat of the third party, the aristocracy; of the 
prominent position which Chartism henceforth will and must 
occupy, in spite of the “conspiracy of silence” of the middle-class 
press; and finally, of the new task, which by these new circumst- 
ances has devolved upon them. That they are quite aware of this 
task is proved by their intention to go to the poll at the next general 
election. 

We have to congratulate you, Sir, in particular, upon your brilliant 
speech at the Nottingham election,* and the striking delineation 
given in it of the contrast between working-class democracy and 
middle-class liberalism. 

We congratulate you besides on the unanimous vote of confidence 
in you, spontaneously passed by the whole Chartist body on the 
occasion of Thomas Cooper, the would-be respectable’s calumnies.** 
The Chartist party cannot but profit by the exclusion of such 
disguised bourgeois, who, while they show off with the name of 
Chartist for popularity’s sake, strive to insinuate themselves into the 
favour of the middle classes by personal flattery of their literary 
representatives (such as the Countess of Blessington, Charles 
Dickens, D. Jerrold, and other “friends” of Cooper’s), and by 
propounding such base and infamous old women’s doctrines as that 
of “‘non-resistance”’. 

Lastly, Sir, we have to thank you and your coadjutors for the noble 
and enlightened manner in which The Northern Star is conducted. 
We hesitate not a moment in declaring that the Star is the only 
English newspaper (save, perhaps, the People’s Journal, which we 
know from the Star only), which knows the real state of parties 
in England; which is really and essentially democratic; which is free 
from national and religious prejudice; which sympathises with 
the democrats and working men (now-a-days the two are almost 
the same), all over the world; which in all these points speaks 
the mind of the English working class, and therefore is the only 
English paper really worth reading for the continental democrats. 
We hereby declare that we shall do everything in our power to 
extend the circulation of The Northern Star on the continent, and 
to have extracts from it translated in as many continental papers as 
possible. 

We beg to express these sentiments, Sir, as the acknowledged 

* O’Connor. [Speech at the Nottingham Nomination Meeting.]— Ed. 

60 Kar] Marx and Frederick Engels 

representatives of many of the German Communists in Germany, 
for all their relations with foreign democrats. 
For the German Democratic Communists of Brussels. 

The Committee, 

Engels 
Ph. Gigot 
Marx 
Brussels, July 17th, 1846 

No. 454, July 25, 1846 

Frederick Engels