"Neue Rheinische Zeitung" — Stein

Stein

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 225, February 18, 1849]

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Cologne, February 16. The Breslau "Association for Lawful Order" (an association "With God for King and Fatherland") addresses an open letter to Dr Julius Stein, in which, among other things, it is stated that the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_ allowed itself to be deceived by Herr Stein’s conservative speeches just as the worthy philistines of Breslau did, and "gave him up as lost" to democracy.

We like definite positions. We have never coquetted with any parliamentary party. The party we represent, the party of the people, exists in Germany only in elementary form. But where it is a matter of fighting against the existing government, we ally ourselves even with our enemies. We take the official Prussian opposition, as it emerges from the wretched German cultural conditions that have prevailed hitherto, as a fact, and therefore during the election campaign we pushed our own views into the background. Now, after the election, we again assert our old uncompromising standpoint not only toward the government but also toward the official opposition.

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

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

As regards Herr Stein in particular, we recall the time when he came forward 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 schoolmaster of a kindred spirit, now a member of the "Association for Lawful Order".

As wretched as the Assembly of Agreement itself 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 denotes the standpoint of these gentlemen that afterwards, in the democratic clubs, they disavow what they affirmed in the assemblies of electors before the election. This petty, sly liberal cunning was never the diplomacy of revolutionary characters.