The Tax Refusal Trial

*Cologne, 9 February.* If the verdict of the jury in our press trial the day before yesterday (No. 218, 10 February 1849, *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*) was of importance to the press, then yesterday’s acquittal of Marx, Schneider and Schapper is decisive for all the trials pending before Rhenish courts in connection with the tax refusal. The facts themselves were perfectly simple and not open to any doubt. The incriminated document read as follows:

“The Rhenish Circle Committee of Democrats summons all democratic associations of the Rhine Province to bring about the adoption and implementation of the following measures:

1) Since the Prussian National Assembly itself has resolved on the refusal of taxes, the forcible collection of these is everywhere to be resisted by every form of resistance;

2) The Landsturm for defence against the enemy is to be organised everywhere. …

3) The authorities are everywhere to be called upon to declare publicly whether they recognise and intend to carry out the resolutions of the National Assembly. In the event of refusal, committees of safety are to be appointed. Municipal councils opposing the legislative assembly are to be replaced by general popular election.”

This document is intelligible enough. Apart from the question of the validity or invalidity of the tax refusal resolution, what plainly lay before us here was the incitement to insurrection and civil war. The accused also made no secret of the fact that by the “enemy” (in paragraph 2) was meant the internal enemy, the armed force of the government. Nevertheless, the state prosecution, despairing of a conviction under this article of the Code, had chosen the milder charge: incitement to rebellion and to resistance against the agents of state authority (Art. 209 et seq.).

Thus the only question at issue was the political one: whether the accused had been authorised by the Assembly’s tax refusal resolution to call in this manner for resistance against state authority, to organise an armed force to oppose that of the state, and to have authorities dismissed and appointed on their own plenary power.

The jury, after a very brief deliberation, answered this question in the affirmative.

Following this decision, Lassalle and Cantador will probably soon be released as well. It is not to be expected that the indictment chamber of Cologne will be of a different opinion with regard to them than the jury was with regard to Marx, Schneider and Schapper.

Tomorrow, moreover, we shall return specifically to Lassalle. People seem to have the well-meaning intention of dragging his case out beyond the next assizes (in March) and thus imposing on him a further three months’ detention under investigation. It is to be hoped, however, that the verdict of the Cologne jury will put a stop to such philanthropic plans. How Lassalle is being treated in Düsseldorf prison, along with some agreeable details, tomorrow.