M. Guizot sees two particular reasons why the English Revolution 
took a more favourable course than the French: first, because the 
English Revolution was thoroughly religious in character and 
therefore by no means broke with all the traditions of the past; 
secondly, because from its very inception it did not act destructively 

but conservatively, and Parliament defended the old laws in force 
against the usurpations of the Crown. 

Concerning the first point, M.Guizot forgets that free-thinking, 
which so horrifies him in the French Revolution, was brought to 
France from no other country than England. Locke was its father, 
and with Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke it assumed that keen-spirited 
form which was subsequently developed so brilliantly in France. We 
thus arrive at the odd conclusion that free-thinking on which, 
according to M. Guizot, the French Revolution foundered, was one 
of the most essential products of the religious English Revolution. 

As far as the second point is concerned, M. Guizot forgets entirely 
that the French Revolution began just as conservatively as the 
English, indeed much more so. Absolutism, particularly as it 
manifested itself finally in France, was here, too, an innovation, and 
it was against this innovation that the parliaments'” rose and 
defended the old laws, the us et coutumes* of the old monarchy based 
on estates. Whereas the first step of the French Revolution was the 
resurrection of the States General,'*! which had been dormant since 
Henry IV and Louis XIII, no fact of equal classical conservatism can 
be found in the English Revolution. 

According to M. Guizot the main result of the English Revolution 
was that the King was put in a position where he could not possibly 
rule against the will of Parliament, particularly the House of 
Commons. The whole revolution consisted in both sides, Crown and 
Parliament, overstepping the mark in the beginning and going too 
far until at last, under William III, they found the correct balance 
and neutralised each other. M. Guizot deems it superfluous to 
mention that the subordination of the monarchy to Parliament 
was its subordination to the rule of a class. He need not therefore go 
into the details of how this class acquired the power necessary to 
make the Crown finally its servant. In his opinion the only issues 
involved in the whole struggle between Charles I and Parliament 
were purely political prerogatives. Not a word about the reason why 
Parliament and the class represented in it needed these prerogatives. 
He has just as little to say about Charles I’s direct interference in free 
competition, which jeopardised England’s trade and industry more 
and more; or about his dependence upon Parliament, which because 
of his constant financial straits became all the greater the more he 
sought to defy Parliament. Hence the only explanation he can find 
for the whole revolution is the malevolence and religious fanaticism 
of individual troublemakers who would not be satisfied with a 

moderate freedom. Nor can M. Guizot enlighten us on the 
connection between the religious movement and the development of 
bourgeois society. The republic, too, is naturally only the handiwork 
of a few ambitious, fanatic and evil-minded people. That about the 
same time attempts to set up a republic were likewise made in Lisbon, 
Naples and Messina,'” patterned likewise, as in England, after 
Holland, is a fact that he entirely fails to mention. Although 
M.Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, he does not 
even draw the simple conclusion that everywhere the transition from 
absolute to constitutional monarchy is effected only after fierce 
struggles and after passage through a republican form of govern- 
ment and that even then the old dynasty, having become useless, 
has to make room for a usurpatory collateral line. The only 
information he can give us about the overthrow of the restored 
English monarchy consists of the most trivial commonplaces. He 
does not even mention its immediate causes: the fear of the new big 
landed proprietors created by the Reformation that Catholicism 
might be re-established, in which event they would naturally have 
had to give back all the lands of which they had robbed the 
Church—a proceeding in which seven-tenths of the entire area of 
England would have changed hands; the commercial and industrial 
bourgeoisie’s dread of Catholicism, which in no way suited their 
book; the nonchalance with which the Stuarts, to their own 
advantage and that of the court aristocracy, sold all English industry, 
as well as trade, to the government of France, that is, to the only 
country which at that time dangerously, and in many respects 
successfully, competed with the English, etc. As M. Guizot omits 
everywhere the most important points, all he has left is a most 
inadequate and banal narration of mere political events. 

The big riddle for M.Guizot, the one for which he sees an 
explanation only in the superior intelligence of the English, the 
riddle of the conservatism of the English Revolution, is the persisting 
alliance of the bourgeoisie with the majority of the big landowners, 
an alliance that distinguishes the English Revolution essentially from 
the French, which eliminated big landed property by parcellation. 
This class of big landowners allied with the bourgeoisie—which, 
incidentally, arose as early as under Henry VIJI—found itself not 
in contradiction with the conditions of existence of the bourgeoisie as 
did French landed: property in 1789, but, on the contrary, in per- 
fect harmony with them. In actual fact their landed estates were 
not feudal but bourgeois property. On the one hand, the landed 
proprietors provided the industrial bourgeoisie with the labour force 
necessary to operate its manufactories and, on the other, were in a 

position to develop agriculture in accordance with the level of 
industry and trade. Hence their common. interests with the 
bourgeoisie; hence their alliance with it. 

For M.Guizot, English history ends with the consolidation of 
the constitutional monarchy in England. For him everything that 
followed was merely a pleasant game of seesaw between Tories 
and Whigs, something in the nature of the great debate between 
M. Guizot and M. Thiers. In reality, however, it was only with the 
consolidation of the constitutional monarchy that the large- 
scale development and transformation of bourgeois society in 
England began. Where M. Guizot sees only placid tranquillity and 
idyllic peace, the most violent conflicts, the most thoroughgoing 
revolutions, were actually developing. It was under the constitutional 
monarchy that manufacture first developed to a hitherto unknown 
extent, to make room, subsequently, for big industry, the steam- 
engine and the gigantic factories. Entire classes of the population 
disappear, and new ones with new conditions of existence and new 
requirements take their place. A new, more colossal bourgeoisie 
arises. While the old bourgeoisie fights the French Revolution, the 
new one conquers the world market. It becomes so omnipotent that 
even before the Reform Bill’ puts direct political power into its 
hands it forces its opponents to pass laws almost exclusively in its 
interests and according to its needs. It wins for itself direct 
representation in Parliament and uses it to destroy the last remnants 
of real power that landed property retains. Lastly, it is engaged at 
present in utterly demolishing the handsome edifice of the English 
constitution which M. Guizot so admires. 

While M. Guizot compliments the English on the fact that in their 
country the detestable excrescences of French social life—republi- 
canism and socialism—have not shaken the foundations of the 
monarchy, the only source of salvation, the class antagonisms in 
English society have become more acute than in any other country. 
Here a bourgeoisie possessed of unequalled wealth and productive 
forces is opposed by a proletariat whose strength and concentration 
are likewise unequalled. Thus what M. Guizot acknowledges in 
England finally comes to this, that here, under the protection of 
constitutional monarchy, far more numerous and far more radical 
elements of social revolution have developed than in all other 
countries of the world taken together. 

When the threads of development in England become entangled 
in a knot which he can no longer cut, even in appearance, with mere 
political phrases, M. Guizot has recourse to religious phrases, to the 
armed intervention of God. Thus, for instance, the spirit of the Lord 

suddenly descends upon the army and prevents Cromwell from 
proclaiming himself king, etc., etc. From his conscience Guizot seeks 
safety in God; from the profane public, in his style. 

Indeed, not only les rois s’en vont, but also les capacités de la 
bourgeoisie s’en vont.* 

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 

REVIEW 
(January-February 1850]! 

A tout seigneur, tout honneur.* Let us start with Prussia. 

The King of Prussia is doing his best to push the present situation 
of tepid agreement, of inadequate compromise, towards a crisis.‘ 
He bestows a constitution and, after various unpleasantnesses, 
creates two Chambers which revise this constitution. Just so that the 
constitution may appear as acceptable as possible to the Crown, the 
Chambers delete every article which might in any way be objectiona- 
ble to it, and believe that now the King will confirm the constitution 
with his oath straight away. But on the contrary. In order to give 
the Chambers a proof of his “royal conscientiousness” Frederick 
William issues an announcement” in which he makes new proposals 
for the improvement of the constitution, proposals whose acceptance 
would deprive the said document of even the least trace of the 
most insignificant so-called constitutional civil guarantees. The King 
hopes that the Chambers will reject these proposals—on the 
contrary. If the Chambers had been disappointed with the Crown, 
then they now made sure that the Crown would be disappointed with 
them. They accept everything: peerage and extraordinary courts, 
Landsturm and entailment, merely in order not to be sent home, 
merely to force the King at last to swear a solemn “corporeal” oath. 
Thus does a Prussian constitutional bourgeois take his revenge. 

The King will find it difficult to invent a humiliation which might 
appear too harsh for these Chambers. He will finally feel himself 

obliged to declare that “the more sacred he holds the sworn vow he is 
to give, the more do the duties laid upon him by God for the beloved 
fatherland appear before his soul”, and the less does his “royal 
conscientiousness” permit him to confirm by oath a constitution 
which offers him everything, but the country nothing. 
_ The gentlemen of the defunct “United Diet’,'*’ who are now 
together again in the Chambers, are so afraid of being driven back to 
their old situation, as it was prior to March 18, because they would 
then again have before them the revolution, which will bring them 
no roses this time. What is more, in 1847 they were still able to refuse 
the loan for the alleged Eastern railway, whereas in 1849 they 
first actually granted the government the loan in question, and 
afterwards most humbly raised with the government the matter of 
the theoretical right of granting the money. 

In the meantime the bourgeoisie outside the Chambers is taking its 
pleasure in jury decisions acquitting those accused of political 
offences, thus demonstrating its opposition to the government. In 
these trials, on the one hand the government and on the other the 
democracy represented by the accused and the public, discredit 
themselves at regular intervals. We remind our readers of the trial of 
the ‘ever constitutional” Waldeck, the trial in Trier.'! etc. 

When old Arndt asks: “What is the fatherland of a German?’’? 
Frederick William IV replies: Erfurt.'°° It was not very difficult to 
travesty the Iliadin the Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, but nobody has 
hitherto dared contemplate a travesty of the Battle of the Frogs and the 
Mice. The Erfurt Plan succeeds in travestying even the battle of the 
frogs and the mice of St. Paul’s Church itself.2 It is of course 
completely irrelevant whether the unbelievable assembly in Erfurt in 
fact assembles or whether the Orthodox Tsar? forbids it, just as 
irrelevant as the protest against its competency, in issuing which 
Herr Vogt will undoubtedly enter into an agreement with Herr 
Venedey. The whole invention is of interest only to those profound 
politicians for whose leading articles the question of a “Great 
Germany” or a “Litthe Germany” was a mine as rich as it was 
indispensable, and to those Prussian bourgeois who live in the 
comforting belief that the King of Prussia will grant everything in 
Erfurt precisely. because he has refused everything 3 in Berlin. 

If the Frankfurt “National Assembly” is to be more or less 
faithfully reflected in Erfurt, then the old Federal Diet will be reborn 

in the “Interim”*°*! and simultaneously reduced to its simplest 
expression, to an Austro-Prussian federal commission. The Interim 
has already materialised in Württemberg and will shortly materialise 
in Mecklenburg and Schleswig-Holstein. 

While Prussia has been able for a long time to scrape its budget 
together by means of emissions of paper money, stealthy loans from 
the Seehandlung,*” and the remains of the state treasury, and has 
only now rushed forward down the road of public loans, in Austria 
state bankruptcy is in full bloom. A deficit of 155 million guilders in 
the first nine months of the year 1849, which is bound to have 
increased to 210-220 million by the end of December; the complete 
ruin of state credit at home and abroad after the resounding failure 
of the attempt at raising a new loan; total exhaustion of the internal 
financial resources: ordinary taxes, contributions, emissions of paper 
money; the necessity of imposing new and desperate taxes on the 
country which had already been sucked dry, taxes which, one can see 
in advance, will not be paid in—these are the main features in which 
naked financial need reveals itself in Austria. Simultaneously the 
decay of the Austrian state organism is proceeding ever more 
rapidly. In vain does the government counter it by means of 
convulsive centralisation; the disorganisation has already reached 
the furthest extremities of the state organism, and Austria is 
becoming intolerable even to the most barbaric nationalities, to the 
principal pillars of the old Austria, to the Southern Slavs in Dalmatia, 
Croatia, and the Banat, the “trusty” borderers.*°? Only an act of 
desperation remains, offering a slight chance of rescue—an external 
war; this external war to which Austria is irresistibly being driven 
must rapidly complete its total dissolution. 

Nor has Russia proved rich enough to pay for its fame, which it 
had to purchase for cash into the bargain. In spite of the widely 
vaunted gold-mines of the Urals and the Altai, in spite of the 
inexhaustible treasures in the vaults of the Peter and Paul fortress, 
in spite of the annuity purchases in London and Paris, allegedly 
made out of a surplus of money, the Orthodox Tsar feels himself 
constrained not only to remove 5,000,000 silver rubles, using all 
kinds of false pretexts, from the bullion stores lying in the Peter and 
Paul fortress as security for his paper currency, and to order the 
sale of his annuities on the Paris Bourse, but also to beg the 
unbelieving City of London for an advance of 30 million silver 
rubles. 

Russia has become so deeply involved in European politics on 
account of the movements of the years 1848 and 1849 that it will 
have to execute its old plans against Turkey, against Constantinople, 

“the key to its house”’,? as speedily as it can if they are not to become 
for ever impossible to execute. The progress of the counter-rev- 
olution and the daily growing power of the revolutionary party in 
Western Europe, the internal situation in Russia itself and the bad 
state of its finances are forcing it towards rapid action. We recently 
saw the diplomatic prelude to this new oriental drama of state 2“; in a 
few months we shall witness the drama itself. 

War against Turkey is necessarily a European war. So much the 
better for Holy Russia, which is thus given an opportunity of. 
obtaining a firm foothold in Germany, leading the counter- 
revolution there energetically to its conclusion, helping Prussia to 
conquer Neuchatel, and, in the last instance, marching on the centre 
of the revolution, on Paris. 

In such a European war England cannot remain neutral. It must 
take a stand against Russia. And for Russia England is by far the 
- most dangerous antagonist. If the land armies of the Continent 
cannot help weakening themselves more and more as a result of their 
having to spread out more the further they press forward into 
Russia, if their advance, upon the penalty of a repetition of 1812, 
must come to an almost complete halt on the eastern frontier of the 
former Poland, England has the means of tackling Russia on its most 
vulnerable flanks. Apart from the fact that it can force Sweden to 
reconquer Finland, St. Petersburg and Odessa stand open to its 
navy. The Russian navy is known to be the worst in the world, and 
Kronstadt and Schlisselburg are as vulnerable to capture as 
Saint-Jean d’Acre and San Juan de Ulua.?” And Russia without 
St. Petersburg and Odessa is a giant with its hands chopped off. 
Moreover Russia cannot dispense with England either for the sale of 
its raw materials or the purchase of industrial products for even as 
little as six months, which emerged clearly at the time of Napoleon’s 
continental blockade,” but is now the case to a far greater degree. 
Cutting off from the English market would in a few months induce 
the most violent convulsions in Russia. England, on the other hand, 
can not only do without the Russian market for a time, but it can also 
procure all Russian raw materials from other markets. One can see 
that the dreaded Russia is by no means so very dangerous. It must 
assume such a terror-inspiring shape for the German burgher, 
however, since it directly controls his princes and since he quite 
rightly suspects that Russia’s barbarian hordes will before long 
inundate Germany and to some extent play a messianic role there. 

Swiizerland’s attitude to the Holy Alliance in general resembles 
that of the Prussian Chambers to their King in particular. Except 
that Switzerland has behind it an additional scapegoat to which it can 
pass on all the blows it receives from the Holy Alliance two- or 
threefold, a scapegoat which is defenceless into the bargain and quite 
abandoned to its favour or disfavour—the German refugees. It is 
true that a section of the “radical”? Swiss in Geneva, in Vaud and in 
Berne has protested against the cowardly policy of the Federal 
Council— cowardly both in respect of the Holy Alliance and of the 
refugees; it is, however, just as true that the Federal Council was 
correct when it maintained that its policy was “that of the huge 
majority of the Swiss people”. In the midst of all this the Central 
Authority quite tranquilly continues to carry out small bourgeois 
reforms internally: centralisation of customs, of coinage, of the post, 
of weights and measures—reforms which assure it the applause of 
the petty bourgeoisie. To be sure it dares not carry out its decision 
concerning the repeal of the military enlistment agreements, and the 
men of the Urcantons still go in droves daily to Como to get 
themselves enlisted in the service of Naples.*°° But in spite of all its 
humility and complaisance towards the Holy Alliance, a fatal storm 
threatens Switzerland. In the first flush of high spirits after the war 
against the Sonderbund and in complete euphoria after the 
February Revolution, the otherwise so timid Swiss allowed them- 
selves to be tempted to imprudent actions. They ventured the 
enormity of wanting at last to be independent; they gave themselves 
a new constitution instead of the one guaranteed by the powers in 
1814, they recognised the independence of Neuchatel?” contrary to 
the treaties. For this they will be punished, in spite of all their bowing 
and scraping, their readiness to oblige and their police services. And 
once it is involved in the European war Switzerland will not find itself 
in the most pleasant of situations; if Switzerland has insulted the holy 
allies, it has on the other hand betrayed the revolution. 

In France, where the bourgeoisie itself is leading the reaction in its 
own interests, and where the republican form of government 
permits reaction its freest and most consistent development, the 
suppression of the revolution is being executed in the most 
shameless and violent fashion. In the short space of one month the 
following measures were taken one after another: the restoration of 
the drink tax, which directly completes the ruin of half the rural 
population, the d’Hautpoul circular, which appoints the gendarmes 
as spies even upon the civil servants, the law on schoolteachers, which 
declares that all elementary schoolteachers are to be subject to 
arbitrary dismissal by the prefects, the education law, which hands 

the schools over to the priests, the deportation law, in which the 
bourgeoisie unleashes the whole of its pent-up lust for vengeance on 
the June insurgents and, in the absence of any other executioner, 
delivers them up to the most deadly climate in the whole of Algeria. 
We will not even mention the innumerable deportations of even the 
most innocent foreigners, which have never ceased since June 13.* 

The purpose of this violent bourgeois reaction is, of course, to 
restore the monarchy. However, the monarchist restoration is 
considerably hindered by the various pretenders themselves, and by 
the parties they have in the country. The Legitimists and the 
Orleanists, the two strongest monarchist parties, more or less 
counterbalance each other; the third party, the Bonapartists, is by far 
the weakest. Louis Napoleon does not, in spite of his seven million 
votes, even possess a real party, he merely has a coterie. Although he 
is given constant support by the majority of the Chamber in the 
general handling of the reaction, he finds himself abandoned as soon 
as his particular interests as pretender emerge, abandoned not only 
by the majority but also by his ministers, who each time give him the 
lie and force him to declare in writing the next day in spite of 
everything that they have his confidence. The quarrels in which he 
thus gets embroiled with the majority, however serious the 
consequences to which they might lead, have for this reason so far 
only been comical episodes in which the President of the Republic 
has each time played the part of the dupe. It goes without saying that 
in these conditions each monarchist faction is conspiring with the 
Holy Alliance on its own initiative. The Assemblée nationale is brazen 
enough to threaten the people publicly with the Russians’; there is 
already ample evidence that Louis Napoleon is plotting with 
Nicholas. 

At the same rate as the reaction advances, the forces of the 
revolutionary party naturally grow too. The great mass of the rural 
population, ruined by the consequences of land parcelling, by the tax 
burden and the purely fiscal nature of most of the taxes, damaging 
even from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, disappointed with the 
promises of Louis Napoleon and the reactionary deputies, the mass 
of the rural population has thrown itself into the arms of the 
revolutionary party and professes a socialism which is, admittedly, 
still very crude and bourgeois for the most part. The revolutionary 
mood of even the most legitimist départements is proved by the latest 

January 25, 1850.— Ed. 

election in the Gard département,?"° the centre of royalism and of the 
“white terror” of 1815, where a red was elected.* The petty 
bourgeoisie, oppressed by big capital, which has once more adopted 
exactly the same position in commerce and politics as under Louis 
Philippe, has followed the rural population. The turnabout is so 
marked that even the traitor Marrast and the grocers’ journal, the 
Siécle, have had to declare themselves socialists. The position of 
the various classes in relation to one another, for which the mutual 
relationships of the political parties are only another expression, is 
again almost exactly the same as on February 22, 1848. Except that 
other matters are now at stake, that the workers are much more 
conscious, and that in particular a class hitherto dead politically, the 
peasantry, has been dragged into the movement and won for the 
revolution. 

In this lies the necessity for the ruling bourgeoisie of trying to 
abolish universal franchise as rapidly as possible; and in this necessity 
lies in turn the certainty of impending victory for the revolution even 
disregarding external circumstances. 

The tension of the situation in general i 1S pei by the comical 
bill proposed by people’s representative Pradié,”? who attempts in 
approximately 200 clauses to prevent coups d’état and revolutions by 
a decree of the National Assembly. And the vast lack of confidence 
felt by high finance for the “order” now apparently restored here 
and in other capitals can be seen in the fact that a few months ago the 
various branches of the house of Rothschild only prolonged their 
deeds of partnership for one year—a period of unprecedented 
brevity in the annals of large-scale commerce. 

While the Continent has been occupying itself for the past two 
years with revolutions, counter-revolutions and the floods of rhetoric 
inseparable from these, industrial England has been dealing in a 
quite different article: prosperity. Here the commercial crisis which 
broke out in due course‘ in the autumn of 1845 was interrupted 
twice—at the beginning of 1846 by the Free Trade decisions of 
Parliament,”!' and at the beginning of 1848 by the February © 
Revolution. A quantity of commodities depressing overseas markets 
had in the meantime gradually found outlets. The February Rev- 
olution eliminated competition from continental industry precise- 
ly in these markets, while English industry did not lose much more 
because of the disturbed continental market than it would have done 

anyway in the further development of the crisis. In this way the 
February Revolution, momentarily bringing continental industry to 
an almost complete standstill, helped the English to weather a year of 
crisis in a quite tolerable fashion, contributed substantially to clearing 
away the piled-up stocks of goods in the overseas markets, and made 
a new industrial upswing possible in the spring of 1849. This 
upswing, which incidentally extended to a great part of continental 
industry, has reached such a level in the last three months that the 
manufacturers are claiming that they have never experienced such 
good times before—a claim always made on the eve of a crisis. The 
factories are overloaded with orders and are working at an 
accelerated rate; every means is being sought to dodge the Ten 
Hours’ Bill* and gain new hours of labour; new factories are being 
built in great numbers in all parts of the industrial regions, and the 
old ones are being extended. Cash is pouring into the market, idle 
capital wants to take advantage of the occasion of universal profit; 
speculation is brimming over with discount-dealing, which is 
throwing itself into production or into the raw materials trade, and 
almost all articles show an absolute and all a relative rise in price. In 
short, England is blessed with “prosperity” in its most splendid 
bloom, and the only question is how long this intoxication will last. 
Not very long, at all events. Several of the largest markets, East 
India in particular, are already almost glutted; export is already less — 
favourable to the really great markets than to the emporia of world 
trade, from which the commodities may be directed to the most 
favourable markets. Soon the markets still left, particularly those of 
North and South America and Australia, will be similarly glutted, 
given the colossal forces of production which English industry added 
to those it already had between 1843 and 1845, in 1846 and 1847, 
and especially in 1849, and which are still being daily added to. And 
with the first reports of this glut, panic‘ will break out simultaneously 
in speculation and production— perhaps as soon as towards the end 
of spring, in July or August at the latest. This crisis, however, since it 
is bound to coincide with great collisions on the Continent, will bring 
forth results quite different from those of all previous crises. 
Whereas every crisis hitherto has been the signal for a new advance, 

a new victory of the industrial bourgeoisie over landed property and 
the finance bourgeoisie, this crisis will mark the beginning of the 
modern English revolution, a revolution in which Cobden will 
assume the role of a Necker. 

And now we come to America. The most important thing to have 
occurred here, more important even than the February Revolution, 
is the discovery of the Californian gold-mines. Already now, after 
barely eighteen months, one may predict that this discovery will have 
much more impressive consequences than the discovery of America 
itself. For three hundred and thirty years the whole of Europe’s 
trade with the Pacific Ocean has been carried with the most moving 
patience around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. All propos- 
als for cutting through the Isthmus of Panama have come to grief 
because of the petty jealousies of the trading nations. It is a mere 
eighteen months since the Californian gold-mines were discovered, 
and the Yankees have already started work on a railway, a large 
highway and a canal from the Gulf of Mexico, steamships are already 
making regular trips from New York to Chagres and from Panama 
to San Francisco, the Pacific trade is already becoming concentrated 
on Panama and the route around Cape Horn is obsolete. A coast 
thirty degrees of latitude in length, one of the most beautiful and 
fertile in the world, hitherto as good as uninhabited, is visibly being 
transformed into a rich and civilised country, densely populated by 
people of all races, from Yankee to Chinaman, from Negro to Indian 
and Malay, from Creole and Mestizo to European. Rivers of 
Californian gold are pouring over America and the Asiatic coast of 
the Pacific Ocean, and dragging the most reluctant barbarian nations 
into world trade, into civilisation. For the second time world trade is 
taking a new direction. The role played by Tyre, Carthage and 
Alexandria in antiquity, and Genoa and Venice in the Middle Ages, 
the role of London and Liverpool until now—that of the emporia of 
world trade—is now being assumed by New York and San Francisco, 
San Juan de Nicaragua’ and Leon, Chagres and Panama. The centre 
of gravity of world commerce, Italy in the Middle Ages, England in 
modern times, is now the southern half of the North American 
peninsula. The industry and trade of old Europe will have to make 
huge exertions if they are not to fall into the same decay as the 
industry and trade of Italy since the sixteenth century, if England 
and France are not to become what Venice, Genoa and Holland are 
today. In a few years we shall have a regular steam-packet service 
from England to Chagres and from Chagres and San Francisco to 

Sydney, Canton and Singapore. Thanks to Californian gold and the 
tireless energy of the Yankees, both coasts of the Pacific Ocean will 
soon be as populous, as open to trade and as industrialised as the 
coast from Boston to New Orleans is now. And then the Pacific 
Ocean will have the same role as the Atlantic has now and the 
Mediterranean had in antiquity and in the Middle Ages—that of the 
great water highway of world commerce; and the Atlantic will 
decline to the status of an inland sea, like the Mediterranean 
nowadays. The only chance the civilised nations of Europe have, not 
to fall into the same industrial, commercial and political dependence 
to which Italy, Spain and Portugal are now reduced, lies in a social 
revolution which, so long as there is still time, will revolutionise the 
mode of production and commerce in accordance with the needs of 
production themselves as they emerge from the modern forces of 
production, thus making possible the creation of new forces of 
production, which can ensure the superiority of European industry 
and so compensate for the disadvantages of its geographical position. 

And finally, another characteristic curiosity from China, which the 
well-known German missionary Gitzlaff has brought back with 
him.?!2 The slowly but steadily growing over-population in this 
country had long made social conditions there particularly oppres- 
sive for the great majority of the nation. Then came the English and 
extorted free trade for themselves in five ports.?!? Thousands of 
English and American ships sailed to China and before long the. 
country was glutted with inexpensive British and American industri- 
al manufactures. Chinese industry, dependent on manual labour, 
succumbed to competition from the machine. The imperturbable 
Middle Kingdom was aroused by a social crisis. The taxes no longer 
came in, the state reached the brink of bankruptcy, the population 
sank en masse into pauperism, erupted in revolts, refused to 
acknowledge the mandarins of the Emperor or the priests of Fé, 
mishandled and killed them. The country reached the brink of ruin 
and is already threatened with a mighty revolution. But worse was to 
come. Among the rebellious plebs individuals appeared who pointed 
to the poverty of some and to the wealth of others, and who 
demanded, and are still demanding a different distribution of 
property, and even the complete abolition of private property.?" 
When Herr Gitzlaff came among civilised people and Europeans 
again after an absence of twenty years, he heard talk of socialism and 
asked what this might be. When it had been explained to him he 
cried out in horror: 

“Shall I then nowhere escape this pernicious doctrine? For some time now many of 
the mob have been preaching exactly the same thing in China!” 

Now Chinese socialism may admittedly be the same in relation to 
European socialism as Chinese philosophy in relation to Hegelian 
philosophy. Nevertheless, it is a gratifying fact that in eight years the 
calico bales of the English bourgeoisie have brought the oldest and 
least perturbable kingdom on earth to the eve of a social upheaval, 
which, in any event, is bound to have the most significant results for 
civilisation. When our European reactionaries, on their presently 
impending flight through Asia, finally come to the Great Wall of 
China, to the gates leading to the stronghold of arch-reaction and 
arch-conservatism, who knows if they may not read the following 
inscription upon them: