Written between June and September 

28, 30, 31, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 and 47, 
July 1, 8, 22 and 29,’ September 30, 
October 7, 14, 21 and 28, November 4 
and 25, 1876; reprinted in the book “ Die 
schlesische Milliarde”. Von Wilhelm Wolff. 
Mit Einleitung von Friedrich Engels, Hot- 
tingen-Zürich, 1886 

Signed: Frederick Engels 

checked with the text of the book 

time 

If I am not mistaken it was towards the end of April 1846. Marx 
and I were then living in a Brussels suburb; we were engaged in a 
joint piece of work* when we were informed that a gentleman 
from Germany wished to speak to us. We found a short but very 
stockily built man; the expression on his face proclaimed both 
goodwill and quiet determination; the figure of an East German 
peasant in the traditional clothes of an East German provincial 
bourgeois. It was Wilhelm Wolff. Persecuted for infringing the 
press laws,'*’ he had been fortunate enough to evade the Prussian 
prisons. We did not suspect at first sight what a rare man lay 
concealed under this inconspicuous exterior. A few days were 
enough to put us on terms of cordial friendship with this new 
comrade in exile and to convince us that it was no ordinary man 
we were dealing with. His cultured mind schooled in classical 
antiquity, his wealth of humour, his clear understanding of 
difficult theoretical problems, his passionate hatred of all oppres- 
sors of the masses, his energetic and yet tranquil nature soon 
revealed themselves; but it took long years of collaboration and 
friendly association in struggle, victory and defeat, in good times 
and bad, to prove the full extent of his unshakable strength of 
character, his absolute, unquestionable reliability, his steadfast 
sense of duty equally exacting towards friend, foe and self. 

a K, Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology.— Ed. 

11* 

Wilhelm Wolff was born on June 21, 1809 in Tarnau, near 
Frankenstein in Silesia. His father was an hereditary serf and also 
kept the court kretscham (the inn—Polish karczma—where the 
village assizes took place), which did not save him from having to 
perform statute labour with his wife and children for his worthy 
lord. Wilhelm was thus not only familiar with the frightful plight 
of the East German bondsmen from early childhood, but also 
suffered it himself. But he learnt more besides. His mother, of 
whom he always spoke with particular affection and who possessed 
an education unusual for her station, roused and nursed in him 
anger at the shameless exploitation and disgraceful treatment of 
the peasants by the feudal lords. And we shall see how this anger 
fermented and seethed in him all his life when we reach the 
period when he was finally able to give vent to it in public. This 
peasant lad’s talents and lust for knowledge soon attracted 
attention; if possible he was to go to grammar school, but what 
obstacles there were to be surmounted before this could be 
achieved! Quite apart from financial difficulties there was the 
worthy lord and his steward, without whom nothing could be 
done. Although serfdom had been abolished in name in 1810,'* 
feudal tributes, statute labour, patrimonial jurisdiction and the 
manorial police remained in existence, thus preserving serfdom in 
practice. And the worthy lord and his officials were far more 
inclined to make peasant lads into swineherds than students. 
However, all barriers were successfully negotiated. Wolff gained 
admission to the grammar school at Schweidnitz and then went to 
university in Breslau. At both of these institutions he had to earn 
the greater part of his living by giving private lessons. At 

Wilhelm Wolff 133 

university he preferred to devote his energies to classical 
philology; but he was not one of those hair-splitting philologists of 
the old school; the great poets and prosaists of the Greeks and 
Romans were received by him with genuine understanding and 
remained his favourite reading as long as he lived. 

He had almost concluded his university studies when the 
persecution of the Demagogues '*? by the Federal Diet' and the 
Austrian and Prussian governments, which had. died down in the 
twenties, was resumed. A member of the Students’ Association,'*' 
he too was arrested in 1834, dragged from prison to prison for 
years while inquiries proceeded, and finally sentenced. For what? I 
do not think that he ever found it worth the trouble of saying. 
Suffice it to say that he was taken to the fortress at Silberberg. 
There he found comrades in suffering, Fritz Reuter among 
others. A few months before Wolff's death, the latter’s Ut mine 
Festungstid came into his hands, and no sooner had he discovered 
the author to be his old fellow-sufferer than he sent news to him 
through the publisher.’** Reuter answered him straightaway in a 
long and very friendly letter, which I have here in front of me 
and which proves that on January 12, 1864, at least, the old 
Demagogue was certainly not the kind of man to knuckle under 
meekly: 

“T’ve been sitting here now for nearly thirty years,” he writes, “until my hair 
has turned grey, waiting for a thorough-going revolution, documenting the 
people’s will energetically once and for all, but to what avail? ... If only the Prussian 

people would at least refuse to pay taxes; it is the only means of getting rid of 
Bismarck and Co. and worrying the old king to death.” 153 

At Silberberg Wolff experienced the many sufferings and few 
joys of the incarcerated Demagogues which Fritz Reuter has 
described so vividly and with such humour in the above book. It 
was pitiful compensation for the damp casemates and bitterly cold 
winters that the old cliffside castle had a garrison of old invalids, 
so-called Garniséner, who were not unduly harsh and were 
sometimes approachable at the price of a schnapps or a four 
groschen piece. Be that as it may, by 1839 Wolff’s health had 
suffered so much that he was pardoned.’™ 

He went to Breslau and tried to make his way as a teacher. But 
he had reckoned without his host, and his host was the Prussian 
government. Interrupted in the middle of his studies by his arrest, 
he had not been able to complete the prescribed three years at the 
university, let alone take his examinations. And in Prussian China 
only someone who had done all this in accordance with the rules 
and regulations was considered to be a competent scholar. Anyone 

134 ; Frederick Engels 

else, however learned he might be in his field, as Wolff was in 
classical philology, was outside the guild and prevented from 
making public use of his knowledge. There remained the prospect 
of struggling through as a private tutor. But a government permit 
was needed for that, and when Wolff applied for one it was denied 
him. The Demagogue would have had to starve to death or return 
to do statute labour in his native village if there had been no Poles 
in Prussia. A landowner from Posen* took him on as a domestic 
tutor; he spent several years here, of which he always spoke with 
particular pleasure.'” 

Having returned to Breslau, after much tribulation and 
contention he finally obtained the permission of a highly esteemed 
royal government to give private lessons, and could now at least 
earn a modest living. Being a man of very few needs, he did not 
ask for more. This was when he resumed the struggle against the 
prevailing oppression, as far as this was possible under the 
dreadful conditions of the time. He had to restrict himself to 
bringing to public attention isolated instances of the despotism of 
civil servants, landowners and manufacturers, and even then 
encountered obstacles with the censors. But he refused to be 
diverted from his purpose. The newly established High Court of 
Censorship had no more regular and persistent client than Wolff, 
the private tutor from Breslau. Nothing afforded him greater 
pleasure than to dupe the censors, which, given the stupidity of most 
of them, was not all that difficult as soon as one became somewhat 
familiar with their weak spots. Thus it was he who scandalised 
pious spirits to the limit by discovering the following popular 
“song” of the repentant sinner in an old hymn book which was 
still in use in some places, and publishing it in the Silesian local 
newspapers: 

I really am a gallows-bird, 
One of the truly bad ones, 
And gobble up my sins unheard 
As Russians eat up onions. 

A cringing dog, I pray to Thee, 
Lord, cast the bone of grace to me, 
Do take me by the ear and throw 

Me to Thy Heaven, though I be low. 

This song spread throughout Germany like wildfire, provoking 
the resounding laughter of the godless and the indignation of 

a Tytus Adam Dzialynski.— Ed. 
> Gesangbuch. See Schlesische Provinzial-Blatter, Breslau, Vol. 112, 1840.— Ed. 

Wilhelm Wolff 135 

those “that are quiet in the Jand”.'° The censor received a harsh 
reprimand, and the government once again began to keep a 
watchful eye on this private tutor Wolff, this turbulent hare-brain 
whom five years’ fortress had failed to tame. And it was not long 
before another pretext was found to put him on trial. After all, 
the old Prussian legislation '*’ was spread out over the country like 
an ingeniously contrived system of traps, snares, pitfalls and nets 
which not even loyal subjects could always avoid, while the disloyal 
ones were all the more certain to get caught in them. 

The press offence with which Wolff was charged at the end of 
1845 or early 1846 was so trifling that none of us can now recall 
the exact circumstances.’ But the persecution attained such 
dimensions that Wolff, who had had quite enough of Prussian 
prisons and fortresses, evaded imminent arrest by leaving for 
Mecklenburg.* Here he found a safe refuge amongst friends until 
his unimpeded passage from Hamburg to London could be 
arranged. In London, where he participated for the first time in a 
public association—the still existing German Communist Workers’ 
Educational Society '°’—he did not remain long but then came, as 
we have already related, to Brussels. 

* According to Wermuth-Stieber: Die Communisten-Verschworungen des 19. 
Jahrhunderts, II, p. 141,159 Wolff was sentenced to three months’ confinement in a 
fortress by the Breslau Supreme Court in 1846 for “offences against the press laws”. 
[Added by Engels in 1886.] 

Il 

In Brussels he soon found employment in a correspondence 
agency '*' which had been set up there, supplying German 
newspapers with French, English and Belgian news, edited, as far 
as circumstances permitted, along Social-Democratic lines. When 
the Deutsche-Briisseler-Zeitung placed itself at the disposal of our 
party Wolff worked for that too. In the Brussels German Workers’ 
Society," which was founded by us at this time, Wolff was soon 
among the favourite speakers. He would give a weekly survey of 
current events which was always a masterpiece of popular 
presentation, both humorous and powerful, in which he castigated 
in particular, and quite rightly, the pettiness and meanness of both 
masters and subjects in Germany. These political surveys were 
such a favourite theme of his that he would deliver them to any 
society in which he took part, and always with the same mastery of 
popular presentation. 

The February Revolution broke out and found an immediate 
response in Brussels. Every evening crowds of people gathered in 
the Great Market place in front of the City Hall, which was 
occupied by the civil guard and gendarmerie; the numerous public 
houses around the market place were packed. People were 
shouting, “Vive la République!”, and singing the Marseillaise,* 
pushing and shoving and being shoved back. The government was 
apparently keeping as quiet as a mouse, but called up the reserves 
and men on leave in the provinces. It had the most respected 
Belgian republican, Mr. Jottrand, secretly informed that the King? 

a Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, Chant de guerre de larmée du Rhin 
(Marseillaise).— Ed. 
b Leopold I.— Ed 

Wilhelm Wolff 137 

was prepared to abdicate should the people so wish, and that he 
could hear this from the King himself as soon as he liked. Jottrand 
was in fact told by Leopold that he was himself a republican at 
heart and would never stand in the way if Belgium should wish to 
constitute itself a republic; his only wish was that everything 
should take place properly and without bloodshed, and he hoped 
incidentally to receive a decent pension. The news was swiftly and 
secretly put out and had such a soothing effect that no attempt at 
insurrection was made. But scarcely were the reserves gathered 
together and the majority of troops concentrated around Brus- 
sels—three or four days were enough in that tiny country—when 
there was no more talk of abdication; suddenly one evening the 
gendarmerie went into action with the flats of their swords against 
the crowds in the market place, and arrests were made right, left 
and centre. Among the first to be beaten and arrested was Wolff, 
who had been quietly proceeding home. Dragged into the City 
Hall, he was given a further beating by the raging and drunken 
city militia, and, after several days’ imprisonment, dispatched over 
the border to France. 

He did not stay long in Paris. The March Revolution in Berlin 
and the preparations for the Frankfurt Parliament and the Berlin 
Assembly prompted him first to go to Silesia to campaign for 
radical elections there.’ As soon as we had started a newspaper, 
whether in Cologne or in Berlin, he wanted to join us. His general 
popularity and his powerful vernacular eloquence succeeded in 
getting radical candidates elected, particularly in the rural 
constituencies, who without him would not have stood a chance. 

In the meanwhile the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on 
June 1 in Cologne, with Marx as editor-in-chief, and Wolff soon 
came to take over his duties on the editorial board.’ His 
inexhaustible energy, his scrupulous, unswerving conscientiousness 
had the drawback for him that the young people, of whom the 
entire editorial board consisted, sometimes took an extra break in 
the certitude that ‘“Lupus* will see that the paper comes out”, and 
I cannot claim to have been wholly innocent of this myself. Thus it 
was that in the early days of the paper Wolff had less to do with 
leading articles than with the day-to-day jobs. But he soon found a 
way of turning these, too, into an independent activity. Under the 
regular heading ‘“‘Aus dem Reich” the news from the small states 
of Germany was assembled; the small-state and small-town 
narrow-mindedness and philistinism of both the rulers and the 

a Nickname of Wilhelm Wolff (Latin Lupus means “wolf”).— Ed. 

ruled were treated with incomparable humour. At the same time 
he gave his survey of current events in the Democratic Society 
every week, which soon made him one of the most popular and 
effective speakers here too. 

The stupidity and cowardice of the bourgeoisie, which had been 
rising ever higher since the June battle in Paris," had again 
allowed reaction to summon up its strength. The camarillas of 
Vienna, Berlin, Munich, etc., were working hand in hand with the 
noble Imperial Regent* and behind the scenes was Russian 
diplomacy, pulling the strings on which these puppets danced. 
Now, in September 1848, the moment for action was approaching 
for these gentlemen. Under direct and indirect Russian pressure 
(conveyed by Lord Palmerston) the first Schleswig-Holstein cam- 
paign was decided by the ignominious Malmo ceasefire. The 
Frankfurt Parliament stooped so far as to ratify it, thus publicly 
and unquestionably renouncing the revolution. The Frankfurt 
uprising of September 18 was the response; it was put down.’ 
Almost simultaneously the crisis between the Constitutional 
Agreement Assembly and the Crown had broken out. On 
August 9, the Assembly had requested the government in an 
extremely mild, indeed timid resolution to be so good as to do 
something to prevent the reactionary officers from indulging in their 
shameless conduct so publicly and offensively.’ When it demanded 
in September that this resolution be put into effect, the response was 
the appointment of the openly reactionary Pfuel ministry with a 
general at its head (September 19) and the appointment of the 
notorious Wrangel as Supreme General of Brandenburg: two broad 
hints to the Berlin Agreers either to go down on their knees or to 
expect a rude dispersal. General excitement set in. In Cologne, too, 
public meetings were held and a Committee of Public Safety 
appointed.’ The government decided to deliver the first blow in 
Cologne. Consequently on the morning of September 25, a number 
of democrats were arrested, including the present Mayor,” then 
generally known as “Red Becker’. The excitement mounted. In the 
afternoon a public meeting was held on the Altenmarkt. Wolff 
presided. The civic militia were formed up on all sides, not objecting 
to the democratic movement but giving first priority to their own 
welfare. In response to an inquiry, they stated that they were there to 
protect the public. Suddenly people crowded into the market place 
with the cry: “The Prussians are coming!” Joseph Moll, also arrested 

a Archduke John.— Ed. 
> In the 1886 edition: “the recently deceased, subsequent Mayor”.— Ed. 
¢ Hermann Heinrich Becker.— Ed. 

Wilhelm Wolff 139 

the same morning but freed by the people, who was then speaking, 
shouted: ‘“‘Citizens, do you intend to run away from the Prussians?” 
“No, no!” was the answer. “Then we must build barricades!” and 
they set to work at once.— The outcome of the day of barricades in 
Cologne is well known. Provoked by a false alarm, without 
encountering any resistance, without any arms—the civic militia 
went prudently home—the whole movement came, quite bloodless- 
ly, to nothing; the government achieved its purpose: Cologne was 
declared in a state of siege, the civic militia disarmed, the Neue 
Rheinische Zeitung banned and its editorial staff compelled to go 
abroad. 

Ill 

The state of siege in Cologne was short-lived. It ended on 
October 4. On the 12th the Neue Rheinische Zeitung resumed 
publication.” Wolff had gone to Durkheim in the Palatinate 
where he was left in peace. There was a warrant out for his arrest 
as for several others of the editorial staff, for conspiracy, etc.; but 
our Wolff did not bide long in the Palatinate, and when the grape 
harvest was over he suddenly turned up in the editorial office 
again, 17 Unter Hutmacher. He managed to find rooms next 
door, from where he was able to cross the yard into the office 
without setting foot in the street. However, he soon tired of 
captivity; disguised in a long overcoat and a cap with a long peak, 
he sallied out into the darkness nearly every evening on the 
pretext of buying tobacco. He believed that no one recognised 
him, although his curiously gnarled figure and determined gait 
were absolutely unconcealable; anyway he was not betrayed. Thus 
he lived for several months while the warrants out for the rest of 
us were gradually lifted. Finally on March 1, 1849 we were 
informed that there was no longer any danger, and Wolff now 
went before the examining magistrate, who also declared that, 
being based on exaggerated police reports, the whole case had 
been dropped.'” 

Meanwhile the Berlin Assembly had been sent packing and 
Manteuffel’s period of reaction had set in.'” One of the first 
measures of the new government was to reassure the feudal lords 
of the Eastern Provinces regarding their disputed right to unpaid 
peasant labour. After the March days the peasants of the Eastern 
Provinces had ceased to perform statute labour, and in places even 
forced the worthy lords to give them a written disclaimer 

Wilhelm Wolff 141 

concerning such labour. It was thus merely a matter of declaring 
this existing state of affairs legal, and the long oppressed peasant 
east of the Elbe would be a free man at last. But the Berlin 
Assembly, a full 59 years after August 4, 1789, when the French 
National Assembly had abolished all feudal burdens without 
compensation, had still not been able to summon up the courage 
to take the same step. It somewhat eased the terms for the 
commutation of statute labour; but only a few of the most 
scandalous and infuriating feudal rights were to be abolished 
without compensation. Yet before this Bill'* was finally passed the 
Assembly was broken up, and Mr. Manteuffel declared that this 
Bill would not be passed into law by the government.* This 
destroyed the hopes of the Old Prussian peasants subject to statute 
labour, and the need now was to influence them by explaining to 
them the position they were facing. And Wolff was just the man 
for this. Not only was he the son of a bondsman and had himself 
been forced to do statute labour as a child; not only had he 
retained the full fervour of his hatred towards the feudal 
oppressors which this childhood had aroused in him; no one knew 
the feudal method of enslavement so well in all its details as he 
did, and this in the very province that provided a complete 
pattern-card of all its manifold forms—Silesia.° 

a [Declaration of the Prussian ministry regarding “Entwurf eines Gesetzes 
betreffend die unentgeltliche Aufhebung verschiedener Lasten und Abgaben vom 
10. Juli 1848,] Preufischer Staats-Anzeiger, No. 223, December 13, 1848 (in the 
section Nichtamtlicher Theil, Deutschland. Preußen).— Ed. 

b In place of the following text, up to “Few of the many inflammatory articles 
in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung...” (see this volume, p. 146), Engels wrote in 1886: 

“Thus Wolff opened the campaign against the feudal lords, which culminated 
in the Silesian Milliard and to which I refer below. It was a campaign which by 
right ought to have been waged by the bourgeoisie. It was, after all, precisely the 
struggle against feudalism that was the mission of this class in world history. But as 
we have seen, it failed to wage it, or only pretended to do so. Thanks to the social 
and political backwardness of Germany, the German bourgeoisie everywhere left its 
own political interests in the lurch, because the proletariat was already looming up 
behind it. The vague hopes and desires of the Parisian workers in February, but 
even more their four-day battle of desperation in June 1848, terrified not only the 
bourgeoisie of France but of all Europe. And in Germany even simple democratic 
demands, such as they had themselves long since carried out legally in Switzerland, 
seemed to the quaking bourgeois to be attacks on their property, their security, 
their lives, etc. As cowardly as ever, the German bourgeois sacrificed their 
common, i.e., political interests so that each might save his private interest, his 
capital. Rather a return to the old bureaucratic-feudal absolutism than a victory of 
the bourgeoisie as a class, than a modern bourgeois state attained in a revolutionary 
way and strengthening the revolutionary class, the proletariat! That was the 
German bourgeoisie’s cry of anguish, in the midst of which reaction triumphed all 
along the line. 

In the issue of December 17, 1848 he opened the campaign in 
an article on the above-mentioned statement by the ministry.* On 
December 29 there followed a second, more blunt one on the 
imposed “Decree concerning the interim settlement of seignorial- 
peasant relations in Silesia”’. 

This decree, says Wolff, 

“is an invitation to our lords the princes, counts, barons, etc., to make haste ‘in the 
interim’ to rob and plunder the rural population under the semblance of law to an 
extent that will enable them, after this fat year, to survive the lean ones all the 
more easily. Before March Silesia was the promised land of the worthy landowners. 
By the redemption laws since 1821! 7 the feudal Junkers had made themselves as 
comfortable as they conceivably could. As a result of the redemptions, which were 
always and everywhere passed and put into effect for the benefit of the privileged 
and the ruination of the rural people, the Silesian Junkers had obtained the tidy 
sum of about 80 millions in hard cash, arable land, and interest from the hands of 
the rural population. And the redemptions were still far from being completed. 
Hence their rage at the godless revolution of 1848. The country people refused to 
go on doing statute labour for the worthy lords like docile cattle, and to go on 
paying the terrible impositions, interest and dues of all kinds. The amounts of 
money flowing into the coffers of the landowners underwent a serious decline.” 

The Berlin Assembly took the settlement of these relations in 
hand. 

“There was danger in delay. This was understood by the camarilla of Potsdam, 
which is equally adept at filling its money-bags from the sweat and blood of the 
country folk. So, away with the Assembly! Let us make the laws ourselves as they 
seem most lucrative to us!—And so it happened. The decree for Silesia published 
in the Staats-Anzeiger is nothing but an entangled snare with all the trimmings, in 
which the rural population, should it once venture in, will be irrevocably lost.” 

Wolff then demonstrates that the decree essentially marks the 
restoration of the pre-March conditions, concluding: 

“Only what’s the use? The worthy lords need money. Winter is here with its 
balls, masquerades, enticing gambling-tables, etc. The peasants who have furnished 
the funds for amusement hitherto, must go on supplying them. The Junkers wish 
to enjoy at least one more merry carnival and exploit the November achievements 

“Thus the party of the proletariat had to take up the struggle at the point 
where the bourgeoisie had absconded from the battlefield. And Wolff took up the 
struggle against feudalism in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. But not in such a way as 
to afford the bourgeois any joy; no, in truly revolutionary fashion, in such a 
manner that the bourgeoisie was just as appalled at these articles exhaling the spirit 
of the great French Revolution as the feudal lords and the government 
themselves.” — Ed. 

@ See Wolff’s article on Manteuffel’s statement against the abolition of feudal 
duties, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 171, December 17, 1848 (in the section 
Deutschland. Koln).— Ed. 

b Here and below Engels quotes Wolff's article [Decree on the Abolition of 
Feudal Duties without Compensation in Silesia”,] Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 181, 
December 29, 1848 (in the section Deutschland. Kéln).— Ed. 

Wilhelm Wolff 143 

of absolutism to the utmost. They are right to make haste, dancing and celebrating 
with defiant arrogance. For soon these divinely favoured aristocratic orgies may be 
mingled with scenes of Galician fury.” 176 

There followed on January 20 a new article by Wolff* which 
dealt with this field. The party of reaction had got a village mayor, 
Krengel from Nessin near Kolberg, and a number of day 
labourers to address an inquiry to the King” whether it was true 
that His Majesty really intended to split up landed property and turn 
it over to the propertyless. 

“One can imagine”, says Wolff, “the mortal terror and sleepless nights of the 
day labourers of Nessin when they heard of such intentions. What? The King 
wants to split up landed property? We day labourers who have up till now tilled the 
field of our worthy lords so joyously for 5 silver groschen a day—are we supposed 
to cease being day labourers and work on our own fields? Our worthy lord, who 
owns 80 to 90 domains and a mere few hundred thousand morgenc—is he to be 
forced to give up so and so many morgen to us?—No, at the mere thought of such 
a frightful disaster our day labourers were atremble in every limb. They had never 
a peaceful moment until they were reassured that they were not to be pitched into 
this bottomless misery, that the menacing morgen of land were to be warded off and 
the worthy lords left in peace just as before.” 

a “(Das kénigl. Patent an die Bauern)”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 200, 
January 20, 1849 (in the section Deutschland. Koln).— Ed. 

>’ See [An Inquiry from the Electors of Nessin to Frederick William IV, 
“Berlin, 12. Januar’], Preußischer Staats-Anzeiger, No. 14, January 14, 1849.— Ed. 

¢ Morgen= 0.6 or 0.9 of an acre depending on local variations.— Ed. 

IV 

All that, however, was still only skirmishing. Around the 
beginning of 1849 the French Social-Democrats started with 
increasing frequency to raise the proposal made earlier that the 
thousand million francs given by the state to the aristocrats 
returning from emigration in 1825 as compensation for estates lost 
in the Great Revolution should be demanded back and employed 
in the interest of the working masses.* On March 16, the Neue 
Rheinische Zeitung carried a leading article on this question and on 
the very next day Wolff published a piece called The Prussian 
Milliard. 

“The knight Schnapphanski” (Lichnowski) “is dead.!77 But highwaymen we still 
have in plenty. The Junkers of Pomerania and Brandenburg have joined forces with 
the other Prussian Junkers. They have donned the holy coat of the respectable 
bourgeois and call themselves ‘Association for the Protection of Property of All 
Classes of the People’, feudal property naturally... Their intention is nothing less 
than to cheat the Rhine Province, among others, out of some 20 million talers and to 
pocket the money. The plan is not a bad one. The Rhinelanders may particularly 
pride themselves on the fact that the Junkers of Thadden-Trieglaff in Eastern 
Pomerania, the von Arnims and the von Manteuffels as well as a few thousand 
cabbage Junkers wish to do them the honour of paying their debts in Rhenish 
money.” 

The fact of the matter was that Mr. von Builow-Cummerow, 
then known as Bilow-Kummervoll,” had hit on a little plan‘* and 
got it accepted by the above association of Junkers—or as Wolff 

a See K. Marx and F. Engels, “The Milliard” (present edition, Vol. 9, 
pp. 79-83).— Ed. 

b A play on words: Cummerow is a proper name, Kummervoll—woeful.— Ed. 

¢ [E. G. G. von] Bilow-Cummerow, Die Grundsteuer und Vorschlige zu ihrer 
Ausgleichung.— Ed. 

Wilhelm Wolff 145 

called it, the Junker Parliament—and sent to the government and 
the chambers as a petition, a plan for settling the question of land 
tax in Prussia. On the one hand, the landowning peasants, 
especially of the Western Provinces, were complaining that they 
had to pay too much land tax; on the other, the aristocratic big 
landowners of the Eastern Provinces were paying no land tax at 
all, although the law of October 27, 1810* had imposed it on them 
along with all other landowners. The Junker Parliament had 
found a way of alleviating both evils. Let us listen to Wolff: 

“The Junkers are willing ‘to make sacrifices in order to eliminate the discord 
now prevailing’.> So they say. Who would have expected such magnanimity of 
them? Of what do these sacrifices consist, however? They propose that the revenue 
from all land-holdings should be fixed by a rough assessment, and then the land 
tax distributed throughout the state at the same percentage of this revenue. Well, 
their generosity is by no means large, since they are now simply intending to do 
what they have been legally obliged to do for the last 38 years. But to continue! Do 
they demand that the Junkers and the landowning knights who have hitherto 
illegally refused to pay tax—should repay this tax, perhaps? No: since from now on 
they are to have the grace to pay their taxes, they should be compensated by an 
appropriate capital payment” —namely, 25 times the amount of the future tax. “On 
the other hand, those who have hitherto been unfairly debited an excessive land 
tax should—not, for instance, have the excess refunded to them—but, on the 
contrary, they should be enabled to discharge the surplus’, by buying themselves out 
with a single payment of 18-20 times the amount involved, according to the 
circumstances.—‘“ The higher taxes will be paid by the peasants in the Eastern 
Provinces and, apart from them, particularly by the Rhine Province. The peasants 
of Altland and the Rhinelanders are thus now expected to pay for this with their 
capital too. Hitherto the noble landowners of the Eastern Provinces have been 
paying no land taxes at all, or very little.... And they, then, are to receive the 
money which the Rhinelanders and the peasants are supposed to raise.” 

There follows a survey of the land tax paid by the various 
provinces in 1848 and their land areas, from which it emerges: 

“The Rhineland pays for every square mile on average approximately five times 
as much land tax as Prussia, Posen and Pomerania, and four times as much as the 
March of Brandenburg.” 

Admittedly the land is better; however, 

“at a conservative estimate, the Rhine Province probably has to pay about a million 
talers more in Jand tax than would be its due according to the average valuation. 
According to the Bill proposed by the Junker Parliament the Rhinelanders would 
thus have to pay as a punishment for this another 18 to 22 million talers in cash, 
which would flow into the pockets of the Junkers of the Eastern Provinces! The 
state would simply act as the banker. These are the tremendous sacrifices which 

a Edikt über die Finanzen des Staats und die neuen Einrichtungen wegen der Abgaben 
u.s.w. In: Gesetz-Sammlung für die Kéniglichen Preußischen Staaten, No. 2, Berlin, 
1810.— Ea. 

b (E. G. G. von] Bülow-Cummerow, Die Grundsteuer..., Berlin, 1849, p. 36.— Ed. 

these cabbage Junkers and pigs are inclined to make; that is the protection which 
they wish to extend to property. Just as every pickpocket protects property... 

“The Rhinelanders, especially the Rhenish peasants, and no less the 
Westphalian and Silesian ones, would do well to look around without delay to see 
where they can raise the money to pay the Junkers. A hundred million talers are 
not so easy to come by these days. 

“So whilst in France the peasants are demanding a thousand million francs 
from the aristocracy, in Prussia the aristocracy is demanding five hundred million 
francs from the peasants! 

“Three cheers for the Berlin March Revolution!” 

Mere defence, however, was not sufficient to counter the 
insolence of the Prussian Junkers. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung 
sought and found its strength in attack, and thus in the issue of 
March 22, 1849 Wolff commenced a series of articles called The 
Silesian ‘Milliard, in which he calculated what sums of money, 
money-value and landed property the Silesian aristocracy alone 
had wrested from the peasants since the redemption of feudal 
dues began. Few of the many inflammatory articles in the Neue 
Rheinische Zeitung had such an effect as these, eight in number, 
which appeared between March 22 and April 25. Orders for the 
newspaper from Silesia and the other Eastern Provinces increased 
at a furious rate; individual issues were requested and eventually, 
since the exceptional freedom of the press allowed us by Rhenish 
law was lacking in the other provinces, and there was no question 
of a reprint under their noble local law, someone came up with 
the idea of secretly reprinting in Silesia the entire eight issues as 
near to the original in appearance as possible and disseminating 
them in thousands of copies—a procedure to which the editorial 
board was naturally the last to object. 

Va 

In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of March 22, 1849 Wolff 
opened his attack on the Silesian Junkers as follows: 

“Scarcely had the Chamber of the Court and cabbage Junkers” (which met on 
February 26, 1849 on the basis of the imposed constitution and the imposed electoral 
law !78)“‘been constituted when a motion for the settlement, i.e. redemption of feudal 
dues, was proposed. The worthy lords are in a hurry. They wish to squeeze enough 
out of the rural population before closing-time to be able to put by a tidy sum for 
any hard times that may be on the way and send it abroad in advance of their per- 
sons. 

“For the terror, for the nameless dread which they suffered during the period 
after the March ‘misunderstanding’ in Berlin and its immediate consequences, they 
are now seeking to extract a doubly dear balsam out of the pockets of their beloved 
village subjects. 

“ Stlesia, particularly, hitherto the golden land of feudal and industrial barons, is 
to be thoroughly rifled once again in order that the splendour of its land-owning 
knights may shine on, enhanced and fortified. 

“Immediately after the appearance of the imposed provisional Redemption Law 
in December last year, we demonstrated that it is solely calculated to benefit the 
worthy landowners, that the so-called little man is entirely at the mercy of the 
whims and caprices of the powerful, even in the composition of the court of 
arbitration. Nevertheless, the knights are still not content with it. They are 
demanding a law bestowing yet more concessions on the knightly purse. 

“In March and April 1848, many noble lords in Silesia made out written 
documents to their peasants renouncing all tithes and duties previously required of 
those subject to the estate. To save their manors from burning and themselves 
from becoming strange adornments on many a stately lime or courtly poplar, they 
gave away their so-called well-earned rights with a stroke of the pen. Luckily for 
them, paper was very patient at that time too. 

a Sections V-VIII and part of Section IX up to the words: “On May 19 the 
Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed...” (see this volume, p. 164) are omitted in the 
1886 edition.— Ed. 

b See this volume, p. 142.— Ed. 

12* 

“When, instead of marching forward, the revolution got stuck in the bog of 
philistinism and complacent temporising, these gentlemen pulled out their deeds of 
renunciation, not in order to fulfil them but to submit them to the criminal court 
as evidence in the inquiry into the rebellious peasant mob.” 

Wolff now relates how the bureaucracy, under the leadership of 
the Oberprasident Pinder and with the aid of mobile military 
columns, forced the peasants to perform their old duties; how the 
peasants were left with no other hope but the Berlin Agreement 
Assembly; how Messrs. Agreers, instead of declaring first and 
foremost all feudal tithes abolished without compensation, frit- 
tered away the time with inquiries into the nature, origins, etc. of 
these admirable feudal duties and tithes, until the reactionaries 
had regained sufficient strength to send the entire Assembly 
packing before it had reached any decision at all about the 
abolition of feudal burdens; how the new Redemption Law was 
imposed and how even this arch-reactionary law failed to satisfy 
the worthy lords and they made even more extravagant demands. 

But our lord knights had reckoned without their host, this host 
being 
“the Silesian peasant, not the bourgeois peasant with three, four or more hides of 
land but that mass of smaller peasants, estate gardeners and free gardeners, 
cottagers and livers-in,!79 who have hitherto been the real beasts of burden of the big 
landowners and who, according to the plans of the latter, should continue as such in 
future in a different form. 

“In 1848 this mass would have been content with abolition of feudal burdens 
without compensation.... After the bitter apprenticeship of the final months of 
1848 and those that have elapsed of 1849, the Silesian agrarian population, the 
‘little man’, is increasingly coming to realise that the knightly landowners, instead of 
seizing new riches by means of a cleverly devised Redemption Law, should by right 
return at least that part of the booty with which they lined their pockets with the 
aid of the previous redemption laws.... From village to village people are now 
occupied with the question of how much our lords the robber knights have stolen 
from the rural people over the last thirty years alone.” 

The situation is not as simple as in France, where compensation 
of 1,000 million francs in round figures—almost 300 million 
talers—was extorted from the nation, so that “the French peasant 
knows how much he must be refunded in capital and interest”. In 
Prussia the exploitation took place year in, year out, and up till 
now only the individual peasant knew what he and his village had 
paid. 

“But now a rough estimate has been made for the whole province, showing that 
in the guise of redemption the rural population has paid the worthy lords more 
than 80 million talers, partly in land and partly in hard cash and interest. In 
addition to this there are the annual tithes and duties of the hitherto 

non-emancipated. For the last thirty years this sum amounts to at least 160 million 
talers, yielding together with the above a total of approximately 240 million talers. 

Wilhelm Wolff 149 

‘“‘Now that these calculations have come to their knowledge, the country people 
have seen the light, and its brightness is causing the feudal accomplices to cower in 
fear. They have devoured 240 million from the pockets of the country people and 
‘we must get back our 240 million at the first opportunity’—that is now the idea 
circulating among the Silesian country people; it is the demand which is already 
being spoken aloud in thousands of villages. 

“The ever-growing awareness that if there is to be any talk of compensation for 
feudal burdens then it is the peasants who must be compensated for the knightly 
robbery perpetrated on them—this is an ‘achievement’ which will soon bear fruit. 
It will not be overthrown by any dictatorial wiles. The next revolution will bring it 
to bear in practice, and the Silesian peasants will then probably be able to devise a 
‘Compensation Law’ restoring not only the stolen capital but also the ‘customary 
interests’ to the pockets of the people.” 

By what “legal title” the Junker gentlemen appropriated this sum 
is the lesson of the second article in the issue of March 25, 1849.* 

“With regard to the manner in which the ‘rights’ of the robber knights were 
acquired, eloquent testimony is provided not only by every page of mediaeval 
history but by every year right up to recent times. The mediaeval knightly sword 
managed splendidly to ally itself with the goose-quill of the lawyer and the civil 
service horde. Force was transformed with a fortune-teller’s sleight of hand into 
‘rights’, into ‘well-earned rights’. An example from last century. In the eighties in 
Silesia at the initiative of the aristocracy, commissions were created for the 
establishment of land registers,!89 the mutual duties and obligations of landowner 
and peasant.... The commissions, composed of nobles and their creatures, worked 
in exemplary fashion—in the interest of the aristocracy. Nevertheless these 
gentlemen by no means succeeded everywhere in producing land registers that 
were ‘confirmed’” (recognised by the peasants). “Where they did, though, it was 
solely by force or trickery.... It is rather naively stated in the introduction to a 
number of such deeds that the peasants had not consented to put their crosses to 
them (at that time only very few were able to write) and that they had been forced 
partly by threats and partly by the actual use of armed force to sign these 
documents defrauding themselves and their descendants. On the basis of such 
‘well-earned rights’ the worthy knights of Silesia have been able over the last thirty 
years to distil that tidy little sum of 240 million talers from the sweat and blood of 
the peasant estate into their ancestral coffers.” 

a {Wilhelm Wolff,] ‘Die schlesische Milliarde”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 
No. 255, March 25, 1849.— Ed. 

vi 

From the direct exploitation of the peasants by the aristocracy, 
Wolff proceeds to the various indirect forms, in which the 
participation of the state plays a major role. 

Firstly, land tax, which was still levied in Silesia in 1849 
according to'a land register devised in 1749.'*! In this land 
register the acreage entered for the land of the nobles was less 
than the real amount, and for the peasants more, right from the 
outset; the yield of a morgen of pasture or arable land was assessed 
at one taler and the land tax levied on this basis. Woods and 
pastures were exempt. Since then the nobles had cleared whole 
stretches of forestland and brought considerable areas of waste- 
land under cultivation. Tax continued to be paid according to the 
acreage of cultivable land entered in the land register of 1749! 
The tax remaining constant for both parties, the peasant with no 
wasteland to bring under cultivation was thus _ considerably 
overburdened, or to put it bluntly: swindled. Furthermore: 

“A large section of the knights, precisely that section which owns the largest and 

most lucrative estate complexes, has hitherto, under the style of ‘well-earned rights’ as 
mediatised peers not yet paid a penny in land tax. 

“If we estimate the land tax which the worthy knights have failed to pay (either 
too little or none at all) over the last thirty years at about 40 million talers—and 
that is probably letting them off lightly—and add to it the 240 million talers stolen 
directly from the pockets of the Silesian country people, we arrive at a total of 
280 million” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung of March 25, 1849). 

Then follows the graduated tax. A Silesian peasant, whom Wolff 
singles out of the masses, 

“owns 8 morgen of land of medium quality, paying a host of tithes annually to his 
‘worthy’ lord, is obliged to perform a large amount of statute labour every year, 
and still has to pay graduated tax of 7 Sgr. 6 Pf. per month, making 3 talers per 

Wilhelm Wolff _ 151 

annum. Contrasted with him we have a worthy lord with the most extensive estates, 
with forests and meadows, iron-works, zinc ore mines, coal mines, etc., e.g. 
arch-wailer,!85 Russophile, democrat-eater and Deputy to the Second Chamber, 
Count Renard. This man has an annual income of 240,000 talers. He pays on the 
highest grade 144 talers graduated tax annually. Compared with the above peasant 
owner with 8 morgen he should have been paying at least 7,000 talers per year in 
graduated tax, making 140,000 talers over 20 years. Thus in 20 years he has paid 
137,120 talers too little.” 

Wolff then compares the amount of graduated tax paid by the 
same Count Renard with the tax paid by a farmhand with a wage 
of 10 talers per year, paying '/, taler or 5 per cent of his cash 
income, and with that of a farm-maid who out of a wage of 
6 talers per year also pays '/, taler in graduated tax, or 8'/s per 
cent of her income. The result is that over 20 years the noble 
count has paid 237,120 talers graduated tax too little compared 
with the farmhand and even 397,120 talers too little compared 

with the maid. 

“According to the sovereign will of Frederick William IV, Eichhorn-Ladenberg 
and the rest of the Christian-Germanic fellowship, primary school” (cf. the 
Eichhorn rescripts until the beginning of 1848) “should be restricted purely to 
reading, writing and the most elementary arithmetic. The first four rules of 
arithmetic, then, would still be allowed to the peasants. There was no need for the 
primary school, however, to teach the peasant the various rules, particularly 
subtraction, or deduction and extraction. In Silesia, at least, the divinely favoured 
robber knights have subtracted so much from around him and out of him that he 
for his part now ought to succeed at the first possible opportunity with flying 
colours in this form of subtraction applied to the worthy lords.” 

Wolff then gives another example of this subtraction practice of 
the Silesian nobility: The waste hides. 

“Wherever rustic hosts” (i.e. peasants) “were ruined by war, epidemics, 
conflagrations or other disasters, the seigneur was swiftly at hand in order to 
absorb the land of the farm concerned, either wholly or partly, into his dominion 
as a ‘waste hide’. But you lords were careful not to take over land tax, house tax 
and the other burdens. These had to be borne either by the whole community or 
by the subsequent owner, who often only received a third, a sixth or an eighth of 
the previous land area in the bill of sale, but all the previous taxes, tithes and 
services. You did the same with common grazing and arable land when, for 
example, the above-mentioned causes had led to a more or less complete 
depopulation of the village. You seized these and other opportunities to combine as 
many lands as possible. But the communities and the individual peasants had to 
bear communal, school, church, district and other burdens unextenuated, as if they 
had never been deprived of a whit.... The yardstick with which you seek to 
measure us, shall be used to measure you, the peasant will reply to you. 

“In your raging appetite for compensation, you have blindly rushed into a 
veritable hornets’ nest of popular damages; if, provoked as they are, they one day 
fly out, you may easily find yourselves suffering scrupulously accurate damages as 
well as a good helping of damage!” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung of March 27). 

a A play on words in the original: Entschddigung—compensation, damages, 
Beschadigung—damage, injury.— Ed. 

In the next article (in the issue of March 29) Wolff describes the 
procedure during redemption of the actual feudal dues. Under 
the notorious General Commissions, which were charged with the 
execution of this business throughout the province, there were the 
Royal Landed Estate Commissaries and their aides, the Royal 
Conductors of Surveying and the actuaries. As soon as the 
application for redemption had been made by the landowner or 
the peasant, these officials appeared in the village, where they 
were straightaway lavishly entertained and suborned by the worthy 
lord up at the manor-house. 

“Often this suborning had already taken place earlier, and since the worthy 
knights do not spare the champagne if anything may be thereby achieved, the 
seignorial efforts to please were generally successful.” 

Certainly there were incorruptible officials here and there, yet 
they were exceptions and even then the peasants were not helped. 

“In cases in which the Landed Estate Commissary himself observed the letter of 
the law, it was of little benefit to the peasants as soon as the Conductor or his 
officials were won over by the lord of the dominion. It was even worse for the 
peasants if, as was generally the case, the most cordial understanding prevailed 
between Landed Estate Commissary, Conductor and sovereign. Then the knightly 
heart was gay and rejoiced. 

“In all the plenitude of power with which the Old Prussian bureaucracy was adept 
at decking out its dependents, the Royal Commissary would now enter the district 
kretscham where the peasants were assembled. He would never fail to remind the 
peasants that he was here ‘in the name of the King’ to negotiate with them. 

“In the name of the King!’ At this phrase all the sombre figures such as 
gendarmes, executors, seignorial judges, district councillors, etc. appear simultane- 
ously in front of the peasant’s eyes. Had he not always been oppressed and 
exploited by them all in that name! ‘In the name of the King!’ That sounded to 
him like the stocks and prison, it sounded like taxes, tithes, statute labour and 
fees.184 For he was obliged to pay all these ‘in the name of the King’. If the 
Commissary’s introduction did not do the trick, if the community or the individual 
peasant proved to be refractory and went against the plans of the lord of the 
domain and Commissary, then the latter would be transmogrified into the 
Olympian Thunderer, hurling one holy hell and damnation after the other into the 
midst of the nonplussed peasant throng, then adding more mildly: If you persist in 
such foolish excesses, I tell you that you will pay for it in full. This symbolic seizure 
of the peasant’s purse would then generally decide the issue: obligations and 
counter-obligations could now be adjusted to suit the wishes of the lord.” 

Now came the surveying, and in the process the corrupt 
Conductor would cheat the peasants for the benefit of the 
landowner. For the assessment of usufruct, land quality, etc. the 
district mayors were brought in as experts, and these too would 
usually deliver judgment in favour of the landowner. After all this 
had been settled and the size in morgen of the land left for the 

4 See this volume, p. 132.— Ed 

Wilhelm Wolff 153 

peasants after the deduction of the area to be relinquished to the 
worthy lord as compensation for the loss of feudal dues had 
finally been established, the worthy knights generally prevailed on 
the Landed Estate Commissary to place the fields of the little man, 
if at all possible, on the worst side. The good land was added to 
that of the estate, and in return the peasants would be allocated 
estate fields which were regularly flooded in wet years. And then 
again, the peasants would be tricked out of another part of their 
fields by the Conductor during the final survey. In the vast 
majority of cases the peasants were helpless; as a rule anyone who 
brought a court case was ruined by it; only in quite exceptionally 
favourable circumstances was a peasant able to obtain his rightful 
dues. 

The end of the business came with the drafting and signing of 
all the recesses and documents of settlement by the General 
Commission and—the general expenses account, which betokened 
the real beginning of the countryman’s distress. 

“To characterise these accounts there is no other epithet than: shameless. No 
matter how the peasant protested or tore his hair: it was all to no avail. After all, it 
was his purse they were after; the exchequer took its share of stamp duty in 
advance, and the rest went to pay the General Commission, the Landed Estate 
Commission etc. This veritable swarm of officials lived in ease and plenty. Through 
their position as Landed Estate Commissary, poor lads have with the aid of 
knightly nefariousness risen very quickly to become the owners of knightly estates 
themselves. It scarcely needs pointing out that the power in the General 

Commission lay in the hands of the nobles. Without them the little deals of our 
worthy knights would not have prospered so well.” 

In good Old Prussian fashion, no account of the total expenses 
of the General Commission has ever been published, so the people 
even do not know how much the redemption of feudal dues, 
insofar as it had been effected by 1848, actually cost them. But the 
individual communities and peasants will never forget how much 
they were forced to “cough up” at this time. 

“For instance, a small village, whose peasants did not even own 30 morgen 
between them, had to pay recess expenses of 137 talers; in another, a peasant with 
7 morgen of fields incurs costs of no less than 29 talers... The robber-knights’ 
compensation dish was so delicious that, spiced with a few Christian-Germanic 
ingredients, it will not be missing from the table of the high and noble lords in 
days to come, either. This tastes of more!—say the Silesian robber-knights, wiping 
their whiskers with a chuckle and smacking their chops as the cabbage Junkers do.” 

Wolff wrote this 27 years ago, and the events he describes 
belong to the period 1820-48; but on reading them today one 
seems to be reading an account of the procedure by which the 
serfs of Russia were emancipated and became so-called free 

peasants after 1861. It agrees to the finest detail. In one feature 
after another this cheating of the peasants in favour of the worthy 
lords is the same. And just as in all official and liberal accounts the 
Russian redemption is described as an enormous benefit for the 
peasants, as the greatest step forward in Russian history, in the 
same way Official and national-servile historiography describes to 
us that piece of Old Prussian peasant-swindling as a world- 
liberating event which puts the great French Revolution—which 

in fact was the cause of the redemption business—in the 
shade! 

Vil 

The Silesian nobility’s list of sins is still not exhausted. In the 
Neue Rheinische Zeitung of April 5, Wolff recounts how the 
introduction of freedom of trade in Prussia offered the robber- 
knights a new opportunity to swindle the country folk. 

“As long as he was still under the obligation to join a guild, the rural artisan or 
tradesman paid the worthy landowner an annual fee, as a rule quite high, for his 
craft or business. In return he enjoyed the advantage of being protected by the 
landowner against competition from others through refusal of trading permits; and 
in addition, the landowner had to bring his work to him. This was precisely the 
position faced by the millers, brewers, butchers, smiths, bakers, kretscham- or 
inn-keepers, shopkeepers, etc.” 

When freedom of trade was introduced, the protection afforded 
to the privileged artisans ceased and everywhere competition 
sprang up. In spite of this the landowners continued to exact the 
fee paid up till then, under the pretext that it did not relate to the 
craft but to the land, and the courts, likewise overwhelmingly on 
the side of the nobility, recognised these preposterous claims in 
the great majority of cases. Yet this was not enough. In time the 
worthy lords had their own water mills and windmills constructed, 
and later steam-powered mills too, thus constituting unbeatable 
competition for the previously privileged miller, and yet they still 
forced him to go on paying the old tax for the former monopoly, 
under the pretext that it was either ground rent or compensation 
for certain insignificant repairs to the watercourse incumbent on 
the landowner, or such like. Thus Wolff quotes the case of a 

a Edikt tiber die Einftihrung einer allgemeinen Gewerbe-Steuer. Vom 28. Oktober 
1810. In: Gesetz-Sammlung für die Kéniglichen Preußischen Staaten, No. 4, Berlin, 
1810.— Ed. 

water mill with two conduits, without any arable land, which had 
to pay 40 talers per annum to the landowner, although he had 
built a rival mill so that one miller after the other went bankrupt 
at the first mill. All the better for the landowner: the mill had to 
be sold and at every change of hands the worthy lord levied 10% 
of the purchase sum in fees for himself! Similarly, a windmill to 
which belonged no more than the ground on which it stood had to 
pay the landowner 53 talers per annum. Such was also the 
situation of the blacksmiths, who had to continue to pay or 
redeem the old monopoly fee, although not only was the 
monopoly abolished but the same landowner who pocketed the fee 
was competing with them with his own smithy—and likewise with 
the other artisans and tradesmen: the fee was either discharged by 
“recess” or still paid, although the other part of the agreement, 
protection against outside competition, had long since been 
dropped. 

So far we have considered only the various forms of exploitation 
which the feudal nobility employed against the landowning 
country people, peasants with two or more hides down to free 
gardeners, free cottagers and meadow cottagers and whatever all 
the people may be called who possess at least a little cottage and 
generally a garden as well. There remained a numerically strong 
class neither in the service of the worthy lord nor owning a cottage 
or even a square foot of land. 

“This is the class of lodgers, the livers-in, in short the tenants; people who have 
rented a room, usually a wretched hovel, for 4-8 talers per year from the peasants, 
gardeners, landless cottagers. Either they are movers, i.e. people who, having 
passed on their farms to relatives or sold them to strangers, have retired into a 
small room there, with or without retaining ‘a share’ in their former property, 
or—and these are the majority—they are poor day-labourers, village artisans, 
weavers, miners, etc.” 2 

How to get at these people? Patrimonial jurisdiction, that 
splendid state of affairs (only now due to be abolished by the 
district regulations) whereby the landowner exercises jurisdiction 
over his ex-subjects, had to provide the pretext. It stipulated that 
when the worthy lord delivered one of the subjects of his 
jurisdiction into gaol, then he had to bear the cost of the 
prisoner’s keep as well as that of the inquiry. For this the worthy 
lord received all the fees which were payable under patrimonial 
jurisdiction. If the arrested person was a peasant, the worthy lord 
made him pay back all the costs, and in extreme cases had his 

4 (Wilhelm Wolff,] “Zur schlesischen Milliarde (Das Schutzgeld)”, Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung, No. 270, April 12, 1849.— Ed 

_ Wilhelm Wolff 157 

house and farm sold. But in order to cover the costs which any 
arrested lodgers might cause him, the landowner imposed an 
annual caution money, called by the more genteel name of 
jurisdiction money, on all persons of this class under his 
jurisdiction. 

“Some of the worthy lords,” says Wolff (Neue Rheinische Zeitung of April 12), 
“contented themselves with one taler a year; others imposed 1 !/, talers, and others 
took their impertinence so far as to demand 2 talers per year from this section of 
the rural proletariat. With this blood money gathered in there was all the more 
gambling and whoring in the capital and at the spas. 

“When there was no money whatsoever to be squeezed out, the worthy lord or 
his bailiff would convert the caution money into 6, 10 or even 12 gratis days’ 
labour” (which the lodger had to work gratis for the worthy lord). “Cash laughs! 
So if the lodger could not pay, the executor was usually set on him to take away his 
last remaining rags, the last bed, table and chair. A few of the worthy lords 
refrained from this barbarism and demanded no caution money, not because it was 
an arrogant right but because in their patriarchal clemency they did not care to 
make use of this alleged right. 

“In this way then, with few exceptions, the lodger has been shamefully 
plundered year in, year out for the benefit of the landowner’s purse. The poor 
weaver, for instance, exploited by the factory-owner on the one hand, with a wage 
of 3-4 silver groschen a day, with !/5 taler of graduated tax for the state, with dues 
to the school, Church and community, was nevertheless forced to pay the worthy 
lord one or two talers caution money, which should be properly called blood 
money. It was the same for the miner, and for all the other landless people. 

“What benefit does he, the lodger, derive from this? The fact that if he has 
been driven by poverty, misery and brutality to stealing or other crimes and is 
brought to justice, then he may remain in prison or house of correction happy in 
the knowledge that he and the class of lodgers to which he belongs have already 
paid the prison costs into the landowner’s purse a hundredfold in advance.... The 
lodger who has paid caution money—let us put it at 11/3 talers per year on 
average—for thirty years without going to gaol has been obliged to throw 40 talers 
cash into the landowner’s purse, not counting interest and interest on interest. For 
this the landowner pays interest on capital of more than 1,000 talers borrowed 
from the Landschaft” (the credit association of the knightly landowners). 

‘What a lucrative source of income the robber-knights found in caution money 
may be deduced from the fact that in most villages there are as many if not more 
lodgers than householders. We recollect one of the smallest robber-knights who 
owned three domains and extorted from the lodgers in his three villages 240 talers 
per year in caution money, with which he paid off the interest on capital borrowed 
from the Landschaft’ (raised on his estate) “of 6,000 talers... 

“After all this the naive may believe that the worthy knights really do pay any 
criminal costs which may arise out of their prenumerando” (by prepayment) “filled 
purses. Such naive faith will be utterly shattered by knightly speculation. Many 
cases are known to us from the twenties and from later years in which the knights 
in their insolence not only raised the caution money from the lodgers but forced 
their beloved village subjects to meet partly 1/3, partly 1/5 and in several villages 2/3 of 
any inquiry and gaol expenses.” 

Vill 

In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of April 14, Wolff deals with the 
hunting right, which was abolished without compensation in 1848 and 
whose restoration or purchase with “damages” the noble Junkers 
were then vociferously demanding. 

“The sanctification of game had the consequence that they preferred to shoot 
down a confounded peasant rather than a hare, partridge or similar protected 
creatures. When hunting with drovers, taken from among their beloved village 
subjects, they were not unduly inhibited; even if one of the drovers was shot at or 
stretched out dead there was at most an inquiry and no more was said. Moreover, 
several cases from that patrimonial heyday are known to us in which the noble 
knight fired a charge of buckshot into the legs or hindparts of one drover or 
another—purely for his private delectation. Even beyond the actual hunt the 
worthy knights would indulge in such pastimes with passion. We always recall in 
this connection the baron who fired a round of buckshot into the thigh of a woman 
gleaning corn in one of his harvested fields despite his prohibition, and then 
recounted his heroic exploit at the dinner table in select robber-knightly company 
with undisguised self-satisfaction.... On the other hand, the beloved village subjects 
had the pleasure of ‘roboting’ (doing service) as drovers at the great noble hunt. 
Every farmer, i.e. every owner of a field and every cottager, was directed to provide 
a drover ‘first thing in the morning’ for the great noble hunt for so and so many 
days. It must certainly have made the worthy knights’ hearts beat with ecstasy to 
have a mob of ill-clad, often barefoot, starving villagers trotting along beside them 
on cold, wet October and November days. The whip hung by the hunting bag for 
the good and edification of hounds and drovers. It was usually the latter who 
received the lion’s share.... Other knights started large pheasant farms.... Woe to 
the woman or girl who through carelessness or lack of tracking sense came too 
close to one of the count’s pheasant nests or alarmed the hen.... I have myself in 
my youth been an eye-witness to how a peasant’s wife for the said reason was 
thrashed in a most barbaric and bestial manner and crippled by a young 
robber-knight, without even a cock crowing afterwards. They were a poor people, 
and protesting, i.e. bringing a court-case,requires money, and also some confidence in 
justice, things which in the majority of the Silesian peasants are found sparingly, if at 
all. 

Wilhelm Wolff 159 

“Seething with rage, the peasant had to watch as the knightly gentlemen, with 
or without their hunters, or as these alone chased across the field which he had 
cultivated with toil and trouble, trampling and putting to waste, sparing no fruit of 
the field, high or low, thick or thin. Right through the middle or over and away 
they galloped with the hunters and hounds. If the peasant presumed to object, a 
laugh of derision was his answer, in the mildest case; many are those who have 
suffered worse, with beaten bodies to show for it. The cabbage in the peasant’s 
field was sought out by the divinely favoured and protected hare as fodder, and 
the peasant planted his trees so as to still the hunger of the hare in winter.... But 
this damage cannot compare with that inflicted on him by deer and wild boar, 
which were protected throughout most of Silesia. Wild boar, red deer and roe deer 
often rooted up, devoured and trampled in a single night what was supposed to 
serve the peasant or the ‘little man’ as food and payment of taxes and tithes for a 
whole year. Of course, the injured party was free to sue for damages. Indeed, 
individuals and whole communities have tried it. The outcome of such cases will be 
self-evident to anyone who has acquired during his life even a remote idea of the 
old Prussian civil service, judiciary and trial procedure.... After interminable 
writing and petitioning the peasant would obtain judgement in a few years, if 
fortune favoured him, against the noble lord, and if he viewed it in broad daylight 
and added it all up, he would find that he had been cheated to the extreme.... But 
the number of villages on whose rustic fields the divinely favoured wild boar, red 
deer and roe deer have harried and ravaged for thirty years, more severely every 
year, amounts to over a thousand. We know several of them, by no means among 
the largest, which have suffered 200-300 talers worth of damage annually solely on 
account of the protected big game.” 

And if the nobility now demands compensation for the abolition 
of this hunting right, then Wolff counters that demand with this 
one: 

“Full compensation for all damage done by game, for all the ravages which 
have been inflicted on our lands for the last thirty years by the divinely favoured 
roe deer, red deer, wild boar and by the worthy knights themselves; to put it in 

round figures: 
“Compensation of at least 20 million talers!” 

The conclusion of the whole thing (Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 
April 25, 1849) is an article on the Polish part of the province, 
Upper Silesia, which in autumn 1847 was struck by a famine as 
severe as that which was simultaneously depopulating Ireland. As 
in Ireland, famine typhus also broke out in Upper Silesia and 
spread like the plague. The following winter it broke out once 
again, yet without any failure of the harvest, flooding or other 
calamity having occurred. What is the explanation? Wolff replies: 

“The greater part of the land is in the hands of big landowners, the fiscus” 
(state) ‘and in mortmain.!85 Only 2/, of the total landed property is in the hands of 
the peasants, and is overloaded with statute labour and tithes to the landowners, as 
well as taxes to the state, the Church, school, district and community to the most 
incredible and shameless extent, whereas the worthy lords, compared with the 
peasants, pay the state a mere pittance at the most.... When rent-day arrives the 
silver interest is wrung out of the peasant with the knout, should he fail to pay 

voluntarily. And so lack of capital and credit and an excess of tithes and services to 
the robber-knights as well as to the state and Church, forced the peasant to throw 
himself into the arms of the Jew and perish helplessly struggling in the toils of the 
artful usurer. 

“In the age-old humiliation and servitude to which the rural population of 
Upper Silesia has been subjected by the Christian-Germanic government and its 
robber-knights, the peasant has found his only solace, as well as a restorative and 
half his nourishment, in alcohol. One must give the worthy lords their due: they 
supplied the peasants with ample quantities of this commodity from their 
distilleries at ever cheaper prices.... Alongside the mud-huts of the Water-Polack 186 
peasants where famine, typhus and brutishness have made their abode, the 
sumptuous palaces, castles and other properties of the Upper Silesian magnates 
appear all the more romantic... On the one hand, the incredibly rapid 
accumulation of riches and colossal annual revenues of their ‘lordships’. On the 
other, the advancing impoverishment of the masses. 

“The day wage for agricultural labourers is mean in the extreme: for a man 5-6 
silver groschen, for a woman 2!/9-3 silver groschen may even be regarded as a high 
rate. Many are compelled to work for a day wage of 4 and 2 silver groschen 
respectively, and even less. Their diet consists almost solely of potatoes and 
schnapps. If only the labourer had even had these two items in sufficient quantity, 
then at least starvation and typhus would have spared Upper Silesia. When, 
however, the staple food became steadily dearer and scarcer as a result of potato 
blight, and the day wage not only failed to rise but actually fell— people had resort 
to plants which they picked in the fields and woods, couch grass and roots, making 
soup with stolen hay and eating the flesh of dead animals. Their strength 
evaporated. Schnapps became more expensive—and even worse than before. 
Schenker is the name given to those persons, most often Jews, who in return for an 
enormous rent to the worthy lords sell the schnapps to the public. The Schenker 
was already accustomed to diluting the schnapps with appropriate amounts of 
water and then strengthening it again with all kinds of ingredients, chief among 
which being oil of vitriol. This poisonous adulteration increased from year to year, 
being carried to an extreme after the outbreak of potato blight. The stomach of the 
peasant, weakened by hay and couch-grass soups, could no longer take such 
medicine. Considering the poor clothing, the filthy, unsanitary housing, the cold in 
winter, and the lack either of work or of strength to work, one realises how, no 
more and no less than in Ireland, these famine conditions very soon gave rise to 
typhus. “The people had nothing in reserve!’ There we have the explanation of it 
all. They were continually exploited and drained dry by the state and the 
robber-knights to such an extent that at the slightest increase in their misery they 
were bound to perish.... The robber-knights, the civil servant. caste, and the whole 
divinely favoured royal Prussian government horde did business, drew salaries, 
distributed gratuities, while down below in the common strata of the people, lashed 
by famine and typhus, they started to die off in their hundreds like animals and 
went on dying. 

“Not much better off than the day-labourers are the farmers, or those who 
possess a house with a plot of land, whether larger or smaller. They too derive 
their main sustenance from potatoes and schnapps. They have to sell what they 
produce to raise the tithes payable to the landowner, the state, etc.... And to be 
forced to perform estate service” (for the worthy lord), ‘to be barbarically 
maltreated by the lord or his officials with the knout, to be forced, toiling, starving 
and beaten, to witness and endure the luxury and arrogance of the robber-knights 
and a snarling caste of officials—this was and is the lot of a great part of the 
Water-Polack population.... 

Wilhelm Wolff 16] 

“The sort of treatment meted out to the estate servants, the farmhands and 
maids of the lords may be readily gauged from what the village subjects liable to 
labour service and the so-called wage-labourers had to endure. Here, too, the 
knout is the Alpha and Omega of the robber-knights’ gospel... 

“The robber-knights rule and dispose as they please. From their ranks are 
taken the Landrats; they train the domanial and district police, and the entire 
bureaucracy works in their interests. Then there is the fact that the Water-Polack 
peasant does not have German officialdom over him—which might be too 
humane—-but an old Prussian one, with its Prussian language and its own 
provincial law. Exploited, maltreated, derided, whipped and cast into fetters by all 
quarters, the Upper Silesian peasant was bound eventually to reach the point he has 
reached. Starvation and plague were bound to ripen as the final fruits in this 
genuine Christian-Germanic soil. Whoever still has the power to steal, does so. That 
is the only form for the Irishised Upper Silesian to actually put up opposition to 
Christian Teutonism and the robber-knights. The next step is beggary; the 
pauperised figures may be seen moving from one place to another in droves. In 
the third rank we discover those who lack the strength or aptitude for either 
stealing or begging. It is to their beds of mouldering straw that the epidemic angel - 
of death pays his most productive visits. These are the fruits of a century of 
divinely favoured monarchist government and the robber knighthood and 
bureaucracy allied with it.” 

And as before, Wolff now demands that the knights compensate 
the peasants, that all statute labour and money dues be abolished 
without compensation, and finally that all the large estates of the 
Upper Silesian magnates be broken up. This would naturally not 
occur, he notes, under the Manteuffel-Brandenburg government, 
and thus “the Upper Silesians would continue as before to fall 
prey to famine and famine typhus in huge numbers”, which 
proved to be literally true, until the tremendous upsurge of Upper 
Silesian industry in the fifties and sixties entirely revolutionised 
the living conditions of the whole region, and _ increasingly 
replaced brutal feudal exploitation with civilised, but even more 
thorough, modern bourgeois exploitation. 

IX 

We have deliberately quoted large extracts from The Silesian 
Milliard, not only because it conveys with the utmost clarity the 
character of Wolff, but also because it gives a true picture of the 
conditions which prevailed until 1848 throughout rural Prussia, 
with the exception of the Rhine Province, in Mecklenburg, 
Hanover, and a few other small states, as well as the whole of 
Austria. Where redemption had taken place the peasant had been 
defrauded; but for half to two-thirds of the peasant population— 
according to locality—-feudal service and tithes to the landowner 
remained, with little prospect of a more rapid rate of redemption 
until the thunderbolt of 1848 and the ensuing period of industrial 
development all but swept away these relics of the Middle Ages as 
well. We say “all but” because in Mecklenburg feudalism continues 
to exist with undiminished power, and also in other backward 
areas of Northern Germany there are as likely as not districts where 
redemption has not yet been effected. In 1849 caution money and 
a few other less important feudal dues were abolished without 
compensation in Prussia; the other burdens were redeemed more 
rapidly than before because the nobility, after the experiences of 
1848 and with the constant difficulty of extracting profitable 
labour from the recalcitrant peasants, was now itself pressing for 
redemption. Finally, with the district regulations, there disap- 
peared the landowners’ seignorial jurisdiction, eliminating, at least 
formally, feudalism in Prussia. 

But only formally. Wherever large-scale landed property is 
prevalent, the big landowners retain a semi-feudal dominance, 
even under otherwise modern bourgeois conditions of manage- 
ment. Only the forms of this dominant position vary. They are 

Wilhelm Wolff 163 

different in Ireland, where the land is cultivated by small tenant 
farmers, and different in England and Scotland, where moneyed 
tenants run large leasehold farms with the aid of wage labourers. 
The domination of the nobility prevalent in Northern Germany, 
especially in the East, approaches the latter form. The large estates 
are mostly run by the owners themselves and more rarely by large 
tenants, with the aid of servants and day labourers. The servants 
are subject to the Regulations for Servants, which in Prussia date 
from 1810 and are so clearly designed for feudal conditions that 
they expressly permit “‘minor acts of violence” by the nobility against 
the servants, while expressly forbidding the latter on pain of criminal 
punishment to offer active resistance to assault from their master, 
except if their life or health be endangered! (General Regulations 
for Servants, §§ 77, 79).* Partly by their contracts but partly by the 
predominant system of payment in kind—which also includes 
housing—the day labourers are reduced to a state of dependence 
on the landowner quite equal to that of the servants; and so even 
today there flourishes east of the Elbe the patriarchal treatment of 
farm labourers and domestic servants, with the punches in the 
face, blows from the stick and cuts of the whip which Wolff has 
described to us in Silesia. Unfortunately the common people are 
getting more and more rebellious and are in some places already 
refusing to tolerate any longer these paternal measures for their 
betterment. 

Since Germany is still preponderantly an agricultural country, 
and the mass of the population therefore gain their livelihood 
from farming and live in the country, it remains the chief but also 
the most difficult task of the workers’ party to make the 
agricultural workers’ interests and position clear to them. The first 
step towards this is that the party should itself become familiar with 
the interests and position of the agricultural workers. Those party 
comrades whom circumstances permit would be doing the cause a 
great service by comparing Wolff’s accounts with present condi- 
tions, collating the changes which have occurred and describing 
the present situation of the agricultural workers. In addition to the 
day labourer proper, the small peasant should not be ignored 
either. How have the redemptions progressed since 1848? Has the 
peasant had his ears boxed as soundly as before in the process? 
Such questions, among others, emerge on their own from reading 
The Silesian Milliard, and if the business of answering them were 

a Gesinde-Ordnung für sémmtliche Provinzen der Preußischen Monarchie. Vom 8. 

November 1810. In: Gesetz-Sammlung für die Koniglichen Preupischen Staaten, No. 5, 
Berlin, 1810.— Ed. 

13* 

undertaken seriously and the resulting material published in the 
party organ, this would be a greater service to the workers’ cause 
than any number of articles about the organisation in detail of the 
society of the future.'*” 

One more point is raised by the conclusion of Wolff’s articles. 
Since 1849 Upper Silesia has developed into one of the focal 
points of German industry. As in the rest of Silesia, this industry is 
situated mainly in the countryside, in large villages or newly 
emerging towns, far from the urban centres. If we are concerned 
with spreading Social-Democracy in the countryside, Silesia, and 
particularly Upper Silesia, offers the most suitable locality for use 
as a lever. In spite of this, Upper Silesia, at least, seems to have 
been virgin soil for socialist propaganda up till now. The language 
cannot amount to an obstacle; on the one hand, the use of 
German has greatly increased there with the growth of industry, 
on the other, there are surely enough socialists who speak Polish. 

But back to our Wolff. On May 19 the Neue Rheinische Zeitung 
was suppressed after the last issue had appeared printed in red. 
Apart from 23 pending press trials the Prussian police had so 
many other pretexts for seizing each individual member of the 
editorial board that they all left Cologne and Prussia immediately. 
Most of us went to Frankfurt, where the decisive point seemed 
near at hand. The victories of the Hungarians provoked the 
Russian invasion; the conflict between the governments and the 
Frankfurt Parliament on account of the Imperial Constitution had 
given rise to various insurrections, of which those in Dresden, 
Iserlohn and Elberfeld had been suppressed, while those in the 
Palatinate and in Baden were still in progress. Wolff had an old 
Breslau mandate in his pocket as the substitute for that old 
distorter of history, Stenzel; they had only got wailer Stenzel 
through by including the agitator’** Wolff as his substitute. Like 
all good Prussians, Stenzel had naturally obeyed the Prussian 
government’s order of recall from Frankfurt. Wolff now took his 
place.” 

The Frankfurt Parliament, having sunk through its own idling 
and stupidity from the position of the most powerful assembly that 
had ever convened in Germany to the most utter impotence, now 
evident to all the governments, even to the Imperial Government 
it had appointed itself and to the very Parliament itself, was at a 
loss what to do, caught between the governments which had 
massed their forces, and the people who had risen to defend the 
Imperial Constitution. There was still everything to be gained if 
only the Parliament and the leaders of the South German 

Wilhelm Wolff 165 

movement showed courage and determination. A parliamentary 
decision calling the armies of Baden and the Palatinate to 
Frankfurt to defend the Assembly would have sufficed. The 
Assembly would thereby have regained the confidence of the 
people at a stroke. The defection of the troops of Hesse and 
Darmstadt, and the accession of Württemberg and Bavaria to 
the movement could then have been anticipated with certainty; the 
small states of central Germany would likewise have been brought 
in; Prussia would have had its hands full, and, in the face of such 
a mighty movement in Germany, Russia would have been 
compelled to retain in Poland part of the troops subsequently 
employed with success in Hungary. Thus Hungary could have 
been saved at Frankfurt, and moreover there was every likelihood 
that with the spread of a victorious revolution in Germany, the 
outbreak that was daily expected in Paris would not have dissolved 
into the uncontested defeat of the radical philistines which 
occurred on June 13, 1849,'% 

The prospects were as favourable as they could be. The advice 
to summon the guard of Baden and the Palatinate was given* in 
Frankfurt, that to march to Frankfurt even without a summons, in 
Mannheim.” But neither the Baden leaders nor the Frankfurt 
parliamentarians had the courage, energy, intelligence or initia- 
tive.“ 

a In the 1886 edition Engels added: “by all of us”.— Ed 

b In the 1886 edition Engels added: “by Marx and myself” .— Ed. 

¢ See also Engels’ ‘““The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution” 
(present edition, Vol. 10).— Ed. 

x 

Instead of acting, the Parliament decided—as if it had not 
spoken too much already—to speak again, namely, in a “Procla- 
mation to the German Nation”. A commission was appointed 
which produced two drafts, the one approved by the majority 
having been prepared by Uhland. Both of them were feeble, 
bloodless and powerless, expressing nothing but their own 
helplessness and dejection and the bad conscience of the Assembly 
itself. At the debate on May 26, they gave our Wolff the 
opportunity to speak his mind to the honourable parliamentarians 
once and for all. The shorthand record of this speech runs*: 

“Wolff of Breslau: 

“‘Gentlemen! I have registered my name against the Proclamation to the Nation 
that has been composed by the majority and read out here, because I think it 
utterly inadequate in the present conditions, because I find it too weak—suitable 
solely as an article for publication in those newspapers which represent the party 
that has conceived it, but not as a Proclamation to the German Nation. Since a 
second has now been read out, I shall only remark in passing that I would oppose 
this one even more strongly, for reasons that I do not need to give here.’ (Voice 
from the Centre: ‘Why not?’) ‘I am speaking only of the majority proclamation; it is 
after all so moderate that even Mr. Buss could not object to it too much, and that 
is certainly the worst recommendation for any proclamation. No, gentlemen, if you 
wish to retain any influence whatsoever over the people, you must not speak to the 
people in the way you do in the Proclamation; you must not speak of legality, of 
legal grounds and so on, but of illegality, in the same way as the governments, as 
the Russians, and by Russians I mean Prussians, Austrians, Bavarians and 
Hanoverians.’ (Commotion and laughter.) “These are all included under the 

a W. Wolff (Speech in the Frankfurt National Assembly on May 26, 1849], 
Stenographischer Bericht tiber die Verhandlungen der deutschen constituirenden National- 
versammlung zu Frankfurt am Main, No. 229, May 28, 1849, Vol. 9, Frankfurt am 
Main, 1849, p. 6749.— Ed. 

Wilhelm Wolff 167 

common name of Russians.’ (Great amusement.) “Yes, gentlemen, in this Assembly, 
too, the Russians are represented. You must say to them: Just as you adopt the 
legal point of view, so shall we. This is the viewpoint of force, and in parenthesis 
you ought to explain that legality means opposing the cannons of the Russians with 
force, with well-organised storming-parties. If you have to issue a proclamation at 
all, then issue one in which you declare from the very outset the first traitor to 
the people, the Imperial Regent,” an outlaw.’ (‘Order!’ Vigorous applause from the 
gallery.) ‘And all the ministers too!’ (Renewed commotion.) ‘Oh no, I will not be 
intimidated. He is the first traitor to the people.’ 

“President Reh: ‘I think that Mr. Wolff has discarded all respect. He cannot 
describe the Archduke Imperial Regent as a traitor to the people before this 
House, and I must therefore call him to order...’ 

“Wolff: ‘For my part, I accept the call to order and declare that I intended to be 
out of order, that he and his ministers are traitors.’ (From all sides of the House: 
‘Order, this is scandalous!’) 

“President: ‘I must deny you leave to speak.’ 

“Wolff: ‘Well, I protest; it was my intention to speak here in the name of the 
people and to say what the people are thinking. I protest against every 
proclamation which is worded in this spirit.’” 

These few words descended like a thunderbolt on the terrified 
Assembly. For the first time the real state of affairs had been 
clearly and openly expressed to its members. The treachery of the 
Imperial Regent and his ministers was a public secret; every one 
of those present saw it occurring before their very eyes; but no 
one dared to put into words what he saw. And now comes this 
disrespectful little Silesian and all at once demolishes their whole 
conventional house of cards! Even the “determined Left” could 
not help protesting energetically against the unforgivable breach 
of all parliamentary decorum which this simple statement of the 
truth constituted, through the mouth of their worthy representa- 
tive Mr. Karl Vogt (Vogt—the man who was sent a remittance of 
40,000 francs in August, 1859, according to the lists of sums paid 
by Louis Napoleon to his agents, published in 1870'*'). Mr. Vogt 
enriched the debate with the following shabbily embarrassed and 
infamously mendacious” protest‘: 

““Gentlemen, I have requested leave to speak in order to defend the 
crystal-clear stream that has flowed from a poetic soul into this proclamation 
against the unworthy filth that has been thrown into the same or’ (!) ‘hurled at the 

same’ (!), ‘to defend these words against the muck which has piled up in this latest 
movement, threatening to swamp and defile everything there. Yes, gentlemen! It is 

a Archduke John.— Ed 

b A play on words in the original: verlegnen (embarrassed) and _ verlognen 
(mendacious).— Ed. 

¢ K. Vogt [Protest against Wolff’s speech in the Frankfurt National Assembly on 
May 26, 1849], Stenographischer Bericht tiber die Verhandlungen der deutschen 
constituirenden Nationalversammlung zu Frankfurt am Main, No. 229, May 28, 1849, 
Vol. 9, Frankfurt am Main, 1849, p. 6751.— Ed. 

muck and filth which are being cast in this’ (!) ‘way at all that may be considered 
pure, and I express my most profound indignation that such a thing’ (!) ‘could 
have happened.’ ” 

Since Wolff had not mentioned Uhland’s editing of the 
proclamation at all, but simply found its content too weak, one is 
at a loss to understand to what Mr. Vogt is actually referring with 
his indignation and his “filth” and “muck”. But on the one hand 
there was the memory of the ruthless way in which the Neue 
Rheinische Zeitung had always treated false brethren of Vogt’s sort; 
on the other, rage at Wolff’s straight language, which made the 
time-serving game of these false brethren henceforth impossible. 
Forced to choose between real revolution and reaction, Mr. Vogt 
declares himself in favour of the latter and the Imperial Regent 
and his ministers—of ‘all that may be considered pure”. 
Unfortunately, the reactionaries wanted nothing to do with Mr. 
Vogt. 

The very same day Wolff challenged Mr. Vogt to a duel with 
pistols through the deputy Wirth from Sigmaringen, and when 
Mr. Vogt declined to shoot it out, threatened him with physical 
chastisement. Mr. Vogt, although physically a giant compared with 
Wolff, now fled under the protection of his sister, not showing his 
face anywhere except in her company. Wolff let the loudmouth 
go. 

Everyone knows how a few days after the scene, the Assembly 
itself recognised the correctness of Wolff’s utterances by fleeing 
from its own Imperial Regent and his government to Stuttgart.'* 

XI 

We are nearing the end. Wolff remained at his post in Stuttgart 
even when the National Assembly was dispersed by the troops 
from Wurttemberg, then going to Baden and finally to Switzer- 
land with the other refugees. He chose Zurich as his place of 
residence, where he immediately established himself as a private 
tutor, but naturally encountered fierce competition from the many 
other graduate refugees living there. In spite of the indigent life 
which ensued, Wolff would have stayed in Switzerland. But it 
became increasingly obvious that the Swiss Federal Council,'” 
obedient to the voice of European reaction, was determined little 
by little to harry all these refugees out of Switzerland, as Wolff put 
it. For most of them, this meant emigrating to America, and this 
was what the governments wanted. Once the refugees were on the 
other side of the ocean there was no being pestered by them. 

Wolff too often pondered on the idea of emigrating to 
America, which the many friends of his who had gone there 
urged him to do. When the “harrying” became too much for him, 
he arrived, half-decided, in London in June 1851, where we gave 
him a place of abode for the time being. Here too the competition 
aS a private tutor was very keen. Wolff was scarcely able to earn 
the paltriest living despite the greatest exertions. He did his 
utmost to keep his position a secret from his friends, as always 
when things were going badly for him. Nonetheless, he had been 
obliged by the end of 1853 to run up debts of about £37 (750 
marks), which weighed very heavily on him; he wrote in his diary 
the same summer: 

“On June 21, 1853 I had to spend my birthday in almost horrible Distress.” 

His intention of going to America would probably have been 
put into effect, had not a likewise fugitive German doctor in 
Manchester,’ who was a friend of Wolff’s from Breslau, obtained 
him enough private lessons in Manchester through his connections 
to enable him at least to live off them. And so he made the move 
in early January 1854.'* In the beginning, certainly, things were 
rather touch-and-go. But his livelihood was assured, and then 
Wolff, with his extraordinary flair for getting on with children and 
winning their affection, was able to count on gradually extending 
his sphere of activities just as soon as he was known among the 
Germans there. This did not fail to happen. After a few years he 
found himself in a fairly comfortable material position for his 
demands, adored by his pupils, universally popular and respected 
by young and old, Englishmen and Germans on account of his 
uprightness, sense of duty and his cheerful amiability. It was in 
the nature of things that he mainly came into contact with 
bourgeois, in other words, more or less politically hostile elements; 
but although he never compromised either his character or his 
convictions in the slightest, only very rarely did he have to weather 
any conflicts, and this he did honourably. At that time we were all 
cut off from public political activity; we were silenced by the 
reactionary legislation, utterly ignored by the daily press and 
hardly honoured by a refusal from the publishers in response to 
any of our offers; Bonapartism seemed to have triumphed over 
socialism forever. For several years Wolff was the only comrade I 
had in Manchester with the same views as myself; no wonder that 
we met almost daily and that I then again had more than ample 
opportunity of admiring his almost instinctively correct assessment 
of current events. 

Suffice it to take a single instance to illustrate Wolff's 
conscientiousness. He set one of his pupils a sum in arithmetic 
from a textbook. He compared the answer with the one given in 
the so-called key, and found it wrong. But when the boy always 
arrived at the same answer after repeated attempts Wolff did the 
sum himself and discovered that the boy was right; the key 
contained a printer’s error. At once Wolff sat down and worked 
through every sum in the book in order to make sure that there 
were no more such errors in the key: “That’s never going to 
happen to me again!” 

This conscientiousness was, in fact, the cause of his death, not 
even 55 years old. In the spring of 1864 he started suffering from 

4 Louis Borchardt.— Ed. 

Wilhelm Wolff 171 

severe headaches due to overwork, which gradually resulted in 
almost total insomnia. His doctor had gone away; he refused to 
consult any other. All pleas for him to cancel or limit his lessons 
for a while were in vain; whatever he had taken on, he wanted to 
see through. Only when he simply could not endure it any more 
did he occasionally cancel his lessons. But it was too late. The 
headaches caused by saturation of the brain with blood went from 
bad to worse, the insomnia became ever more unremitting. A 
blood-vessel in the cerebrum burst, and after repeated cerebral 
haemorrhages death occurred on May 9, 1864. With him, Marx 
and I lost our most faithful friend, and the German revolution a 
man of irreplaceable worth. 

Frederick Engels