Sir,— The undersigned discharge a duty to themselves and 
towards their now condemned friends at Cologne, by laying before 
the English public a statement of facts connected with the recent 
monster trial in that city, which have not been made sufficiently 
known by the London press. 

Eighteen months have been wasted on the mere getting up of 
the evidence for this trial. During the whole of that time our 
friends have been kept in solitary confinement, deprived of all 
means of occupation and even of books; those who became ill 
were refused proper medical treatment, or if they obtained it, the 
condition in which they were placed prevented them from 
benefiting thereby. Even after the “act of accusation” had been 
communicated to them, they were prohibited, in direct violation of 
the law, from conferring with their lawyers. And what were the 
pretexts for this protracted cruel imprisonment? After the lapse of 
the first nine months the “Chamber of Accusation” declared that 
there were no grounds on which a charge could be maintained, 
and that, therefore, the instruction had to be recommended. It 
was recommended. Three months later, at the opening of the 
assizes, the public accuser pleaded that the mass of the evidence 
had grown into a larger bulk than he had as yet been able to 
digest. And after three further months the trial was again 
adjourned, on the ground of the illness of one of the chief 
Government witnesses. 

The real cause of all this delay was the fear of the Prussian 
Government to confront the meagre substance of the facts with 
the pompously announced “unheard-of revelations.” At last, the 
Government succeeded in selecting a jury, such as the Rhenish 
provinces had never yet beheld, composed of six reactionary 
nobles, four members of the haute finance, and two members of 
the bureaucracy. 

Now, what was the evidence laid before this jury? Merely the 
absurd proclamations and correspondence of a set of ignorant 
phantasts, importance-seeking conspirators, the tools and as- 
sociates at once of one Cherval, an avowed agent of the police. 
The greater part of those papers were formerly in the possession 
of a certain Oswald Dietz in London. During the Great Exhibi- 
tion’ the Prussian police, while Dietz was absent from his home, 
had his drawers broken open, and thus obtained the desired 
documents by a common theft. These papers, in the first instance, 
furnished the means of discovering the so-called Franco-German 
plot at Paris.“° Now, the proceedings at Cologne proved, that 
those conspirators, and Cherval, their Paris agent, were the very 
political opponents of the defendants and their undersigned 
London friends. But the public accuser pleaded, that a mere 
personal quarrel had prevented the latter from taking part in the 
plot of Cherval and his associates. By such an argumentation it 
was intended to prove the moral complicity of the Cologne 
defendants in the Paris plot; and while the accused of Cologne 
were thus made responsible for the acts of their very enemies, the 
professed friends of Cherval and his associates were produced by 
the Government in court, not at the bar like the defendants— nay, 
in the witness-box, to depose against them. This, however, 
appeared too bad. Public opinion forced the Government to look 
out for less equivocal evidence. The whole of the police machinery 
was set to work under the direction of one Stieber, the principal 
Government witness at Cologne, royal councillor of police, and 
chief of the Berlin criminal police. In the sitting of October 23rd, 
Stieber announced, that an extraordinary courier from London 
had delivered to him most important documents, proving, 
undeniably, the complicity of the accused in an alleged conspiracy 
with the undersigned. 

“Amongst other documents, the courier had brought him the original 

minute-book of the sittings of the secret society, presided over by Dr. Marx, and 
with whom the defendants had been in correspondence.” 

Stieber, however, entangled himself in discordant statements as 
to the date on which his courier was to have reached him. Dr. 
Schneider, the leading counsel for the defence, charged him 
directly with perjury, upon which Stieber ventured no other reply 
than to fall back upon his dignity of the representative of the 
Crown, entrusted with a most important mission from the very 
highest authority of the State. As to the minute-book, Stieber 
declared twice on oath, that it was the “genuine minute-book of 
the London Communist Society,” but later on, closely pressed by 
the defence, he admitted that it might be a mere book of notes, 
taken by one of his spies. At length, from his own evidence, the 
book was proved to be a deliberate forgery, and its origin traced 
back to three of Stieber’s London agents, Greif, Fleury, and 
Hirsch. The latter has since admitted that he composed the book 
under the guidance of Fleury and Greif. So decisive was the 
evidence at Cologne on this point, that even the public accuser 
declared Stieber’s important documents a “most unfortunate 
book,” a mere forgery. The same personage refused to take notice 
of a letter forming part of the Government evidence, in which the 
handwriting of Dr. Marx had been imitated; that document, too, 
having turned out a gross and palpable forgery. In the same 
manner every other document brought forward in order to prove, 
not the revolutionary tendencies, but the actual participation of 
the accused in some distant plot, turned out a forgery of the 
police. So great were the Government’s fears of an exposure, that 
it not only caused the post to retain all documents addressed to 
the counsel for the defence, but the latter to be intimidated by 
Stieber, with a threatened prosecution for his “criminal correspon- 
dence” with the undersigned. 

If now, in spite of the absence of all convincing proof, a verdict 
has, nevertheless, been obtained,””” that result has only become 
possible, at the hands even of such a jury, by the retroactive 
application of the new criminal code, under which The Times and 
the Peace Society themselves might at any time be tried on the 
formidable charge of high treason. Moreover, the trial at Cologne 
had assumed, by its duration, and by the extraordinary means 
employed on the part of the prosecution, such vast dimensions, 
that an acquittal would have equalled a condemnation of the 
Government; and a conviction prevailed generally in the Rhenish 
provinces, that the immediate consequence of an acquittal would 
be the suppression of the entire institution of the jury. 

We are, Sir, your most obedient servants, 

F. Engels 
F. Freiligrath 
K. Marx 
W. Wolff 
London, November 20, 1852