Karl Marx / Wilhelm Wolff
Stein
Cologne, February 16. The Breslau “Association for Lawful Order” (a society with God for King and Fatherland) addresses an open letter to Dr. Julius Stein, in which it is said, among other things, that the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* was just as deceived by Herr Stein’s conservative speeches as the worthy philistines of Breslau, and “gave him up as lost to democracy.”

We love decided positions. We have never coquetted with any parliamentary party. The party we represent, the party of the people, exists in Germany only in an elementary form. But wherever there is a struggle against the existing government, we ally ourselves even with our enemies. We accept the official Prussian opposition, as it emerges from the miserable German cultural conditions to date, as a fact, and therefore, in the election struggle, we allowed our own views to step into the background. Now, after the election, we again assert our old, uncompromising standpoint not only against the government, but also against the official opposition.

The “Association for Lawful Order” is mistaken. We do not “give up Herr Stein, Waldeck & Co. as lost to democracy”. We have always congratulated democracy on not being represented by the Steins, the Waldecks & Co.

In one of our first issues we declared that the extreme Left of the Berlin Assembly of Conciliation would, in a Convention, form the extreme Right, with the exception of three or four people. We never counted Stein and Waldeck among those three or four.

As regards Herr Stein in particular, we recall the time when he appeared as a fanatical constitutionalist against the republicans and formally denounced the representatives of the working class in the *Schlesische Zeitung*, and had them denounced by a kindred spirit of a schoolmaster, a present member of the “Association for Lawful Order”.

Just as miserable as the Assembly of Conciliation was the so-called democratic fraction of that Assembly. It was to be foreseen that the gentlemen, in order to be re-elected, would now recognise the imposed constitution. It characterises the standpoint of these gentlemen when, afterwards, in the democratic clubs, they disavow what they affirmed before the election in the electoral assemblies. This petty, cunning liberal shrewdness was never the diplomacy of revolutionary characters.