"New Rhine Gazette" — Fall of the Camphausen Ministry

Fall of the Camphausen Ministry

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 23, June 23, 1848]

Cologne, June 22.

However fair the sun may shine,
It must set at last,
<Ferdinand Raimund, "The Girl from Fairyland; or, The Peasant as Millionaire">

and the sun of March 30, dyed in hot Polish blood, has also set.

The Camphausen Ministry had donned the liberal-bourgeois garb of the counter-revolution. The counter-revolution feels strong enough to cast off the irksome mask.

An arbitrary, untenable ministry of the left centre may possibly follow the ministry of March 30 for a few days. Its real successor is the

Ministry of the Prince of Prussia. Camphausen has the honour of having given the absolutist-feudal party this its natural chief, and himself his successor.

Why continue to cosset the bourgeois guardians any longer?

Are the Russians not on the Eastern frontier and the Prussian troops on the Western? Have the Poles not been courted for Russian propaganda by shrapnel and hell-stone?

Have not all the measures been taken to repeat the bombardment of Prague in almost all the Rhenish towns?

In the Danish war, the Polish war, in the many petty conflicts between soldiers and people, has the army not had every opportunity to train itself into a brutal soldiery?

Is the bourgeoisie not weary of revolution? And does there not rise, amid the sea, the rock upon which the counter-revolution will build its church —
England?

The Camphausen Ministry still seeks to scrape up a few pennies' worth of popularity, to arouse public pity by asserting that it quits the stage of state as a
dupe. And certainly it is a deceived deceiver. In the service of the big bourgeoisie it had to seek to swindle the revolution out of its democratic fruits; in the struggle with democracy it had to ally itself with the aristocratic party and become the instrument of its counter-revolutionary appetites. That party has grown strong enough to be able to throw its protector overboard.
Herr Camphausen sowed reaction in the sense of the big bourgeoisie; he reaped it in the sense of the feudal party. That was the man's good intention; that his evil fate. A penny's worth of popularity for the disappointed man.

A penny's worth of popularity!

However fair the sun may shine,
It must set at last!
Yet in the East it rises again.