The political turmoil of the last six months is fundamentally 
different from that which immediately preceded it. Everywhere the 
revolutionary party has been forced off the stage and the victors are 
quarrelling over the fruits of victory. Thus it is in France with the 
various factions of the bourgeoisie and in Germany with the various 
princes. The quarrel is being conducted with a great deal of noise, 
and it appears inevitable that there will be an open break and that the 
issue will be decided by force of arms; however what is inevitable is 
that the arms will remain unused and that peace treaties will time 
and again be used to conceal the indecision, so as to prepare for 
another sham war. 

Let us first examine the underlying reality beneath this superfi- 
cial turbulence. 

The years 1843-45 were years of industrial and commercial 
prosperity, necessary consequences of the almost uninterrupted 
depression of industry in the period 1837-42. As always, prosperity 
very rapidly gave rise to speculation. Speculation regularly occurs at 
times when over-production is already in full swing. It provides 
channels by which this over-production may temporarily be diverted, 
whilst by this very process hastening the onset of the crisis and 
magnifying its impact. The crisis itself first breaks out in the field 
of speculation and only seizes hold of production later. Not 
over-production, but over-speculation, itself only a symptom of 
over-production, therefore appears to the superficial view as the 
cause of the crisis. The subsequent disruption of production appears 
not aS a necessary consequence of its own previous exuberance, but 
merely as a repercussion of the collapse of speculation. However, as 
we cannot at the present moment give a complete history of the 

Review 491 

crisis* [after] 1843-45, we shall simply list the most significant of these 
same symptoms of over-production. | 

In the years of prosperity from 1843 to 1845 the principal targets 
for speculation were railways, where it was based on a real need; 
corn, following the price rises of 1845 and the potato blight; cotton, 
after the bad harvest of 1846; and trade with East India and China, 
where it followed hard upon the opening up of the Chinese market 
by Great Britain. 

The expansion of the British railway system had already begun in 
1844 but did not develop fully until 1845. In that year alone the 
number of registered bills” for the setting up of railway companies 
amounted to 1,035. In February 1846, after a vast number of these 
registered projects had already been abandoned, the moneys which 
were required to be deposited with the government for the 
remaining projects still totalled the enormous sum of £14,000,000 
and even in 1847 the sum total of moneys called for exceeded 
£42,000,000, of which over 36 million were for railways in Britain 
and later‘5'/. million for those abroad. This speculation had its 
heyday in the summer and autumn of 1845. Share prices rose 
continuously, and the speculators’ profits soon drew every class of 
society into the whirlpool. Dukes and earls vied with merchants and 

-manufacturers for the lucrative honour of sitting on the boards of 
the various lines; the members of the Lower House, the Bar and the 
Church were represented in strength on these bodies. Anybody who 
had a penny in savings, or who had the merest glimmer of credit to 
dispose of, speculated in railway shares. The number of railway 
newspapers rose from 3 to more than 20. Some large daily 
newspapers would often earn £14,000 in a week from railway 
advertisements and prospectuses. Engineers were simply not to be 
had in sufficient numbers and received enormous salaries. Printers, 
lithographers, bookbinders, stationers, etc., etc., who were set to 
preparing prospectuses, plans, maps, etc., etc., and furniture 
manufacturers who furnished the spate of offices of the countless 
new boards of management, provisional committees and the like, 
were paid munificently. Based on the real expansion of the British 
and continental railway systems and the speculation which was 
bound up with it, there gradually arose during this period a 
superstructure of fraud reminiscent of the time of Law and of the 

* In a copy of the “Review” containing Engels’ corrections the word “crisis” is 
replaced by the word “period” .— Ed. 
The authors use the English word.— Ed. 
© Ina copy of the “Review” containing Engels’ corrections the word spdter (later) is 
replaced by über (over).— Ed. 

South Sea Company.” There were projects for hundreds of lines 
which had not the slightest chance of success, which their very 
authors never had any intention of really carrying out, and whose 
sole purpose indeed was to enable the directors to squander the 
deposits, and to make fraudulent profits from the sale of the shares. 

In October 1845 the reaction set in and grew in intensity until it 
soon became complete panic. Even before February 1846, when the 
deposits had to be paid to the government, the least viable projects 
had gone bankrupt. In April 1846 the repercussion had already 
reached the continental share markets. In Paris, Hamburg, 
Frankfurt and Amsterdam there was forced selling at very reduced 
prices, which brought bankruptcies of bankers and brokers in its 
train. The railway crisis dragged on into the autumn of 1848, 
prolonged by successive bankruptcies even of less unsound projects, 
as these were gradually affected by the general pressure and as 
invested money was called in, and accentuated by the spreading of 
the crisis to the other areas of speculation, trade and industry, as 
well, which progressively depressed the price of the older and 
sounder shares until these reached their lowest level in October 
1848. 

It was in August 1845 that the public first became aware of the 
potato blight which was appearing not only in Great Britain and 
Ireland but on the Continent as well—the first symptom that the 
roots of existing society were rotten. At the same time reports were 
coming in which no longer left any room for doubt about the 
expected grave deficiency in the corn harvest too. The price of corn 
rose significantly on all European markets as a result of these two 
circumstances; in Ireland there was universal famine which forced 
the British Government to make a loan of £8 million to that 
province— exactly one pound sterling for each Irishman. In France, 
where the calamity was further aggravated by the floods which 
caused damage to the value of some £4 million, the harvest failure 
was unusually severe. No less so in Holland and Belgium. The poor 
harvest of 1845 was followed by a worse one in 1846, and the potato 
blight also reappeared, although on a smaller scale. Thus speculation 
in grain was given an entirely real basis and it developed all the more 
powerfully since the abundant harvests of 1842-44 had long held 
it down almost completely. In the years 1845-47 more grain was 
imported into Britain than ever before. The price of corn rose con- 
tinuously until the spring of 1847, when varying reports from the 
different countries about the new harvest and the measures taken by 
various governments (opening of the ports to the free import of corn, 
etc., etc.) ushered in a period of fluctuation, and prices finally 

Review 493 

reached their peak in May 1847. In that month the average price of a 
quarter of wheat in Great Britain rose to 102/2 shillings and on some 
days to 115 and 124 shillings. But soon decidedly favourable reports 
came in about the weather and the ripening harvest; prices fell, and 
by mid-July the average price stood at only 74 shillings. Less 
favourable weather in some parts caused prices to rise again 
somewhat, until it was finally clear towards the middle of August that 
the 1847 harvest would be above average. The downward trend was 
now no longer to be contained; supplies to Great Britain increased 
‘beyond all expectation, and by September 18 the average price had 
been reduced to 49/2 shillings. Within the space of 16 weeks the 
average price had thus fluctuated by no less than 53 shillings. 

Throughout this period there had not only been a continua- 
tion of the railway crisis, but at the very moment when corn prices 
were at their highest, in April and May 1847, the credit system was 
also completely dislocated and the money market completely dis- 
rupted. The speculators in corn nevertheless withstood the fall in 
prices until August 2. On that day the Bank raised its lowest rate of 
discount to 5 per cent and for all bills of exchange at over two 
months to 6 per cent. There immediately followed a series of the 
most sensational bankruptcies on the Corn Exchange, headed by that 
of Mr. Robinson, Governor of the Bank of England. In London 
alone eight large corn companies failed, their liabilities together 
amounting to more than £1'/. million. The provincial corn markets 
were completely paralysed; bankruptcies followed hard upon each 
other here, especially in Liverpool, with equal speed. The 
corresponding business failures on the Continent in this field 
occurred with greater or lesser rapidity, depending on the distance 
from London. By September 18, the date of the lowest corn prices, 
the corn crisis in England can however be regarded as over. 

We now come to the commercial crisis proper, the money crisis. In 
the first four months of 1847 the general condition of trade and 
industry still appeared satisfactory, with the exception however of 
iron production and the cotton industry. Iron production, inflated 
to an enormous degree by the railway bubble of 1845, naturally 
suffered in proportion as the outlets diminished for the excess 
quantity of iron produced. In the cotton industry, the main branch 
of industry for the East Indian and Chinese markets, there had been 
over-production for these markets as early as 1845, and a relative 
recession had occurred very soon. The poor cotton harvest of 1846, 
the rise in the price both of the raw material and of the finished 
product, and the reduced consumption this entailed, increased the 
pressure on this industry. In the early months of 1847 production 

was cut back considerably throughout Lancashire, and the cotton 
workers were already affected by the crisis. 

On April 15, 1847, the Bank of England raised its lowest rate of 
discount on very short bills to 5 per cent; it restricted the total value 
of the bills to be discounted, and this without regard to the nature of 
the businesses on which the bills were drawn; finally it abruptly 
announced to the merchants to whom it had made advances that it 
would no longer renew these advances when they fell due, as it had 
usually done before, but [would] demand repayment. Two days later 
the publication of its weekly balance showed that the reserve fund of 
the Banking Department? had fallen to £2'/2 million. The Bank had 
thus taken the above measures to stem the outflow of gold from its 
vaults and increase its liquidity once more. 

Various causes underlay the outflow of gold and silver from the 
Bank. Firstly, consumption and the significantly higher prices of 
almost all goods required an increase in circulation, especially of gold 
and silver, for retail trade. Then the continuing investment in 
railway construction, which in April alone had totalled £4,314,000, 
had made necessary the withdrawal of a mass of deposits from the 
Bank. A portion of the money called in, being destined for railways 
abroad, flowed directly overseas. The significant excess of imported 
sugar, coffee and other colonial products, whose consumption and 
whose prices had been pushed up even more by speculation,” of 
cotton following speculative buying now that a poor harvest had 
become a certainty, and especially of corn following the repeated 
crop failures, had to be paid for largely in cash or bullion, which also 
resulted in a significant outflow of gold and silver overseas. This 
outflow of precious metals from Great Britain incidentally continued 
until the end of August despite the above measures taken by the 
Bank. - 

The Bank’s decisions and the news of the low level of its reserves 
immediately created pressure on the money market and panic 
throughout commerce in Great Britain of an intensity only seen in 
1845. In the last weeks of April and the first four days of May almost 
all credit transactions were paralysed. There were, however, no 
abnormal bankruptcies; businesses survived by enormous interest 
payments and forced sales of stocks, government securities, etc., 
at ruinous prices. Even some of the sounder businesses merely 
prepared the ground for their later collapse by their escape from this 
first act of the crisis. The overcoming of the first, most menacing 

* The authors use the English words “Banking Department” .— Ed. 

In Engels’ copy: “whose consumption and especially whose prices had been 
pushed up by speculation” .— Ed. 

Review 495 

danger contributed considerably to an increase of confidence; from 
May 5 the pressure on the money market slackened visibly, and 
towards the end of May the alarm was more or less over. 

A few months later, however, at the beginning of August, there 
occurred the above-mentioned bankruptcies in the corn trade, which 
continued into September, and hardly had they run their course 
when the crisis broke out with redoubled fury throughout 
commerce, especially in the East Indian, West Indian and Mauritius 
trade, and indeed simultaneously in London, Liverpool, Manchester 
and Glasgow. During September twenty businesses failed in London 
alone, their total liabilities amounting to between £9 and £10 million. 

“There were uprootings of commercial dynasties in England not less striking than 
the fall of those political houses” on the Continent “of which we have lately heard so 
much,” said Disraeli on August 30, 1848, in the Lower House. 

The failures in the East Indian business continued without respite 
until the end of the year and began again in the early months of 1848 
when the news came in of the bankruptcy of corresponding com- 
panies in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Mauritius. 

This series of bankruptcies, unprecedented in the history of 
commerce, was caused by the general over-speculation and by the 
excessive importing of colonial products that this involved. The 
prices of these goods, which had long been kept artificially high, fell 
in some cases even before the panic of April 1847, but fell generally 
and significantly only after this panic, when the whole credit system 
collapsed and one business after another was driven to make massive 
forced sales. This downward trend was so steep, especially from June 
and July until November, that even the oldest and soundest busi- 
nesses could not escape being ruined by it. 

The bankruptcies in September were still confined exclusively to 
actual commercial enterprises. On October 1 the Bank raised its lowest 
discount for short bills to 5'/2 per cent and declared at the same time 
that henceforth it would make no more advances on any government 
securities of whatever kind. Now the joint-stock banks and private 
bankers could no longer withstand the pressure either. The Royal 
Bank of Liverpool, the Liverpool Banking Company, the North and 
South Wales Bank, the Newcastle Union Joint-Stock Bank, etc., etc., 
succumbed one after the other within a few days. At the same time 
declarations of insolvency were made by a number of minor private 
bankers in every corner of Great Britain. 

Consequent upon this general closure of the banks which 
characterised October in particular, there followed in Liverpool, 
Manchester, Oldham, Halifax, Glasgow, etc., a significant number of 

bankruptcies of stock-, bill-, share-, ship-, tea- and cotton-brokers, 
iron producers and iron-merchants, cotton and wool spinners, 
calico-printers, etc. According to Mr. Tooke these bankruptcies were 
unprecedented in the history of British commerce, both in terms of 
their number and the amount of capital involved, and far exceeded 
those of the 1825 crisis.* The crisis had reached its peak on October 
23-25, and all commercial transactions had come to a complete 
standstill. At this point a deputation from the City obtained a 
suspension of the Bank Act of 1844, that brainchild of the late Sir 
Robert Peel.*°° This suspension temporarily put an end to the 
division of the Bank into two completely independent departments 
with two separate cash accounts; if the old system had continued 
for a few days longer, one of these departments, the Banking 
Department, would inevitably have failed, whilst the Issue 
Department” had gold reserves of six million. 

The first repercussions of the crisis appeared on the Continent as 
early as October. Major bankruptcies occurred simultaneously in— 
Brussels, Hamburg, Bremen, Elberfeld, Genoa, Leghorn, Courtrai, 
St. Petersburg, Lisbon and Venice. As the crisis abated in intensity in 
Great Britain, so it increased on the Continent and affected places 
that it had not hitherto reached. In the worst period the exchange 
rate favoured Great Britain, which consequently attracted a 
constantly increasing flow of gold and silver from November 
onwards, not only from Russia and the Continent, but also from 
America. The immediate result of this was that as the money market 
eased in Great Britain, it contracted elsewhere in the commercial 
world and the crisis spread there to an equal extent. The number of 
bankruptcies outside Great Britain thus rose in November; major 
insolvencies now also occurred in New York, Rotterdam, Amster- 
dam, Le Havre, Bayonne, Antwerp, Mons, Trieste, Madrid and 
Stockholm. In December the crisis also broke out in Marseilles and 
Algiers, and acquired renewed vigour in Germany. 

We have now reached the point at which the February Revolution 
broke out in France. If one looks at the list of bankruptcies which Mr. 
D. M. Evans gives as an appendix to his Commercial Crisis 1847-1848 
(London, 1848),° one finds that in Britain not a single business of any 
note collapsed as a result of this revolution. The only insolvencies 
connected with it occurred on the stock market, as a result of the 

* Th. Tooke, A History of Prices, and of the State of the Circulation, from 1839 to 1847 
inclusive, London, 1848, p. 316— Ed. 

> The names of the Bank departments are given in English in the original.— Ed. 

© D. M. Evans, The Commercial Crisis 1847-1848, Appendix, pp. LXX-LXXX.— Ed. 

Review 497 

sudden devaluation of all continental government stock. Similar 
bankruptcies of stock-brokers in Amsterdam, Hamburg, etc., as well, 
of course. British consols fell by 6 per cent, whereas they had fallen 
by 3 per cent after the July Revolution.* For stockjobbers therefore 
the Republic of February was only twice as dangerous as the July 
monarchy. : 

The panic which broke out in Paris after February and spread 
throughout the Continent at the same time as the revolutions, had a 
great deal of similarity to the London panic of April 1847. Credit 
suddenly vanished, and business transactions almost all came to a 
halt; in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam everybody rushed to the 
Bank to exchange notes for gold; by and large, however,very few 
bankruptcies occurred outside the stock market, and even these few 
cannot easily be shown to be necessary consequences of the February 
Revolution. The Paris bank closures, which were mostly only of brief 
duration, were in part connected with the stock market, in part 
merely precautionary measures and certainly not the result of real 
insolvency, and finally in part the product of deliberate machinations 
to harass the Provisional Government and compel it to make 
concessions. In the case of failures of bankers and traders in other 
places on the Continent, it is impossible to decide to what extent they 
arose from the continuation and gradual spread of the commercial 
crisis, to what extent the conditions of the day were at the same 
time used by businesses which had long been on the road to ruin in 
order to effect a judicious exit, or to what extent they were 
really consequences of losses resulting from the revolution panic. 
However, this much at least is certain, that the commercial crisis 
contributed infinitely more to the revolutions of 1848 than the 
revolution to the commercial crisis. Already between March and May 
Britain derived direct advantage from the revolution, which brought 
her large amounts of continental capital. From this moment on the 
crisis there must be regarded as over; in every branch of business an 
improvement came about, and the new industrial cycle began with a 
marked tendency towards prosperity. Just how little the revolution 
on the Continent hindered this upsurge of industry and trade in 
Great Britain is demonstrated by the fact that the quantity of cotton 
manufactured there ‘rose from £475 million (1847) to £713 million 
(1848). 

This renewed prosperity made visible progress in Great Britain 
during the three years 1848, 1849 and 1850. For the eight months 
from January to August, Great Britain’s total exports amounted to 

* Of 1830.— Ed. 

£31,633,214 in 1848; to £39,263,322 in 1849; to £43,851,568 in 
1850. Besides this significant rise, which was manifest in all branches 
of business with the exception of iron production, there were also the 
universally good harvests of these three years. The average price of 
wheat for 1848-50 fell to 36 shillings per quarter in Great Britain 
and to 32 shillings in France. What distinguishes this period of 
prosperity is that three main outlets for speculation were blocked. 
Railway construction had reverted to the slow development of an 
ordinary industry; with a series of abundant harvests, grain offered 
no scope; the revolutions had deprived government stock of its 
characteristic reliability, which is a prerequisite for the large-scale 
speculative turnover of stock. In every period of prosperity, capital 
is increased. On the one hand, increased production creates new 
capital; on the other hand, existing capital which was lying dormant 
during the crisis, is brought out of its inactivity and cast on to the 
market. In the absence of outlets for speculation between 1848 and 
1850, this additional capital was of necessity injected into industry 
itself, and thus increased production even more rapidly. How 
striking this is in Great Britain, although no one can explain it, is 

demonstrated by the naive observations of The Economist on October 
19, 1850. 

“Tt is remarked that the present prosperity differs substantially from that of all 
former periods, in all of which there was some baseless speculation exciting hopes that 
were destined not to be realised. At one time it was foreign mines, at another more 
railways than could be conveniently made in half a century. Even when such 
speculations were well founded, they contemplated a realisation of income, from 
raising metals or creating new conveniences and markets,’ at the end of a considerable 
period, and afforded no immediate reward. But at present our prosperity is founded 
on the production of things immediately useful, and that go into consumption nearly 
as fast as they are brought to market, returning to the producers a fair remuneration 
and stimulating more production.” 

The most striking demonstration of the great increase in industrial 
production in 1848 and 1849 is provided by the most important 
sector of industry, cotton manufacturing. The cotton harvest of 1849 
in the United States was more abundant than any previous one. It 
amounted to 2%%4 million bales or approximately 1,200 million 
pounds. The expansion of the cotton industry kept pace with this 
increased supply to such an extent that at the end of 1849 stocks 
were lower than they had been even after years of bad harvest. In 
1849 over 775 million pounds of cotton were spun, whereas in 1845, 

* The words “and markets” were added by the authors.— Ed. 

Review 499 

the year of the greatest prosperity hitherto, only 721 million had 
been manufactured. The expansion of the cotton industry is further 
demonstrated by the great rise in the price of cotton (55 per cent) as 
a result of a comparatively insignificant decline in the yield in 1850. 
At least equal progress is manifested in all the other branches, such 
as spinning and weaving of silk, wool, mixtures and linen. The 
export of the products of these industries rose so considerably, 
especially in 1850, that it brought about the great rise in overall 
exports of that year (12 million compared with 1848, 4 million 
compared with the first eight months of 1849), although the export 
of cotton goods decreased noticeably in 1850 as a result of the poor 
cotton harvest. Despite the significant rise in the price of wool, which 
speculation appeared to be causing as early as 1849 and which has 
nevertheless continued until the present, the woollen industry has 
been continuously expanding and new looms are brought into 
commission daily. In 1844, the year of the highest linen exports 
hitherto, exports of linen fabrics totalled 91 million yards, having a 
value of £2,800,000, and in 1849 they reached the level of 107 
million yards, having a value of over £3,000,000. 

Another demonstration of the growth of British industry is 
provided by the constantly increasing consumption of the main 
colonial products, especially of coffee, sugar and tea, at a time of 
continuously rising prices, at least of the first two items. This increase 
in consumption is all the more directly a consequence of the 
expansion of industry as the exceptional market since 1845, which 
was produced by the extraordinary investment in railways, has long 
been reduced to its normal dimensions, and the low corn prices of 
the last few years have not permitted any increased consumption in 
agricultural areas. 

The great expansion in the cotton industry in 1849 led in the last 
few months of that year to a renewed attempt to make use of the East 
Indian and Chinese markets. But the quantity of old stocks that 
had not yet been disposed of in those areas soon imposed restraints 
on this attempt once more. At the same time, with the rising 
consumption of raw materials and colonial products, an attempt 
was made to speculate also in these articles, but that too was soon 
terminated by a temporary increase in supplies and by the memory 
of the still too recent wounds of 1847. 

The prosperity of industry will be further increased by the recent 
opening up of the Dutch colonies, by the imminent establishment of 
new lines of communication in the Pacific Ocean, of which we shall 
have more to say, and by the great industrial exhibition of 1851. This 
exhibition had already been announced by the British bourgeoisie in 

1849, with the most astounding sang-froid, when the dreams of the 
whole Continent were still haunted by revolution. Under its auspices 
the British bourgeoisie is summoning every one of its vassals from 
France to China to gather for a great examination at which they 
will have to show how they have used their time; and even the 
omnipotent Tsar of Russia* cannot but command his subjects to 
appear in large numbers at this great test. This great world congress 
of products and producers has an altogether different significance 
from the absolutist congresses of Bregenz and Warsaw,””! which are 
putting our democratic philistines on the Continent into such a 
sweat, or the European democratic congresses which the various 
provisional governments in partibus” are constantly planning anew 
for the salvation of the world. This exhibition is a striking dem- 
onstration of the concentrated power with which modern large- 
scale industry is breaking down national barriers everywhere 
and increasingly blurring local peculiarities of production, social 
relations and the character of each individual] nation. By displaying, 
narrowly confined within a small space, the whole mass of the 
productive forces of modern industry, precisely at a time when 
modern bourgeois relations have already been undermined from 
every side, it is at the same time exposing to view the material which 
has been produced amidst these conditions of decay and is still being 
produced each day for the building of a new society. By means of this 
exhibition the bourgeoisie of the world is erecting in the modern 
Rome its Pantheon in which to exhibit with proud self-satisfaction 
the gods it has made to itself. In so doing it is proving in practice that 
the “impotence and annoyance of the citizen”, about which German 
ideologists have been preaching year in, year out, is only the 
impotence of these gentlemen themselves to comprehend the 
modern movement, and their own annoyance at this impotence. The 
bourgeoisie is celebrating this, its greatest festival, at a moment 
when the collapse of all its glory is at hand, a collapse which will 
demonstrate more conclusively than ever to it that the powers it has 
brought into being have grown beyond its control. At a future 
exhibition the bourgeois will perhaps no longer figure as owners of 
these productive forces but only as their ciceroni. 

Just as the potato blight in 1845 and 1846, since the beginning of 
this year the deficiency of the cotton harvest is spreading universal 
terror amongst the bourgeoisie. This terror has been further 

? Nicholas I.— Ed. 

> Here governments in partibus means governments with nobody to govern, by 
analogy with Roman Catholic bishops in partibus infidelium, i. e. bishops appointed to 
dioceses in non-Christian countries.— Ed. 

Review 501 

considerably intensified since it has become clear that the cotton 
harvest of 1851 will certainly not prove to be much more abundant 
than that of 1850 either. The deficiency, which would have been 
insignificant in former times, is of major proportions in view of the 
present size of the cotton industry and has already had a most 
restrictive effect on its activity. The bourgeoisie, which had scarcely 
recovered from the depressing discovery that one of the basic pillars 
of its whole social order, the potato, was in danger, now sees its 
second pillar, cotton, threatened as well. If but a single moderately 
poor cotton harvest and the prospect of a second one could provoke 

grave alarm amid the jubilation of prosperity, a few years in ~ 
succession of outright failure in cotton will inevitably hurl the whole 
of civilised society temporarily back into barbarism. The golden age 
and the iron age are long past; it remained for the nineteenth 
century with its intelligence, its world market and its colossal 
productive forces to create the cotton age. The British bourgeoisie at 
the same time felt more than ever before what an oppressive 
domination the United States has over them through its as yet 
unbroken monopoly of cotton production. They at once set about 
the business of breaking this monopoly. Not only in East India but 
also in Natal and the northern parts of Australia and indeed in every 
part of the world where climate and conditions permit the cultivation 
of cotton, they have decided to promote it by every means. At 
the same time the British bourgeoisie who sympathise with 
the Negroes are discovering that “the prosperity of Manchester 
dependent on the treatment of slaves in Texas, Alabama and 
Louisiana, is aS curious as it is alarming”’. (The Economist, September 
21, 1850.*) The fact that the crucial sector of British industry is based 
on the existence of slavery in the southern states of the American 
Union and that a Negro revolt in those areas can ruin the whole 
present system of production is of course very depressing for the 
people who a few years ago spent £20 million on the emancipation of 
the Negroes in their own colonies.**? This fact, however, at the same 
time leads to the only feasible solution to the slave question, which 
has now once more led to such long and heated debates in the 
American Congress. American cotton production is based on slavery. 
As soon as industry has developed to the point when the cotton 
monopoly of the United States has become intolerable to it, cotton 
will be successfully produced in vast quantities in other countries, 
which almost everywhere can now only be done through free workers. 

* “Slavery in the United States. To the Editor of The Economist”, The Economist No. 
369, September 21, 1850.— Ed. 

But as soon as the free labour of other countries provides industry 
with its cotton supplies in sufficient quantity and more cheaply than 
the slave labour of the United States, American slavery will have 
been broken at the same time as the American cotton monopoly, and 
the slaves will be emancipated because as slaves they will have 
become unusable. In exactly the same way wage labour will be 
abolished in Europe as soon as it not only ceases to be a necessary 
form of production, but has even become a hindrance to it. 

If the new cycle of industrial development which began in 1848 
follows the same course as that of 1843-47, the crisis would break out 
in 1852. As a symptom of the fact that the over-speculation which is 
produced by over-production, and which precedes every crisis, can 
no longer be far away, we would mention here that for two years the 
Bank of England’s rate of discount has stood no higher than 3 per 
cent.* If however the Bank of England keeps its interest rate low in 
times of prosperity, the other money merchants must set theirs even 
lower, just as in times of crisis, when the Bank raises the interest rate 
significantly, they keep it above that of the Bank. The additional 
capital which, as we saw above, is regularly cast on to the loan market 
in times of prosperity, by itself depresses the rate of interest 
significantly, according to the laws of competition; this rate is 
however reduced to a much greater degree by the credit, which has 
been enormously swollen by the general prosperity, as this 
diminishes the demand for capital. In these periods the government 
is enabled to bring down the interest rate on its consolidated debts 
and the landowner to renew his mortgages on more favourable 
conditions. Thus, at a time when the income of all the other classes is 
rising, the capitalists of the loan market see their own diminished by 
a third or more. The longer this state of affairs lasts, the more they 
are compelled to look around for a more profitable investment for 
their capital. Over-production gives rise to numerous new projects, 
and the success of a few of them suffices to propel a whole series of 
capital investments in the same direction, until the bubble gradually 
becomes universal. At this moment there are, however, as we have 
seen, only two possible major outlets for speculation: cotton growing 
and the new world market links which have been created by the 
development of California and Australia. One can see that it will 
have vastly greater scope for its activity this time than it had in any 
previous period of prosperity. 

Let us also take a look at the situation in the agricultural areas of 
Great Britain. Here the abolition of the duty on corn and the 

* The text of the “Review” mistakenly has 2 per cent.— Ed. 

Review 503 

simultaneous abundant harvests have made the general pressure 
chronic, though to some extent reduced by the significantly 
increased consumption resulting from prosperity. Furthermore, 
farm workers at least always find themselves in a relatively improved 
position when corn prices are low, although this improvement is less 
marked in Great Britain than in countries where fragmentation of 
landed property predominates. In these conditions the protectionists 
continue to agitate in the farming districts for restoration of the duty 
on corn, although less explicitly, more covertly than before. It is 
obvious that their agitation will have no significance at all as long as 
industrial prosperity and the relatively more tolerable situation of 
the farm workers last. However as soon as the crisis breaks out 
and has repercussions on the farming districts, the depression in 
agriculture will rouse feelings in the countryside to an unusually 
high degree. On this occasion for the first time the industrial and 
commercial crisis will coincide with a crisis in agriculture, and in all 
questions in which town and country, manufacturers and landown- 
ers are opposed to one another, both parties will be supported by 
two great armies; the manufacturers by the mass of industrial 
workers, the landowners by the mass of agricultural workers. 

We now come to the United States of North America. The crisis of 
1836, which had its first and most violent manifestations there, lasted 
almost without interruption until 1842 and resulted in a complete 
revolution in the American credit system. On this sounder basis, 
trade in the United States recovered, admittedly very slowly at first, 
until from 1844 and 1845 onwards prosperity grew there significant- 
ly too. Both the rise in prices and the revolutions in Europe were for 
America simply sources of profit. From 1845 to 1847 it profited 
from the enormous export of corn and from the increased price of 
cotton after 1846. It was only little affected by the crisis of 1847. The 
1849 cotton harvest was its largest yet, and in 1850 it profited by 
about $20 million from the poor cotton harvest, which coincided 
with the new upsurge in the European cotton industry. The revo- 
lutions of 1848 resulted in a great outflow of European capital to the 
United States, which in part arrived with the immigrants themselves 
and in part was invested from Europe in American government 
stock. This increased demand for American consolidated stocks 
raised the price of the latter to such an extent that speculators in New 
York have recently been falling over themselves in pursuit of them. 
Despite all assurances to the contrary from the reactionary bourgeois 
press, we therefore persist in our opinion that the only form of state 
in which our European capitalists have confidence is the bourgeois 
republic. Indeed, bourgeois confidence in any form of state only 

18* 

expresses itself in one way: by its quotation on the Stock Exchange. 

The prosperity of the United States was increased even more 
however by other factors. The inhabited area, the market of the 
North American Union, was expanding in two directions with 
surprising rapidity. The growth of the population, both by natural 
increase and by the constant rise in immigration, led to the effective 
control* of whole states and territories. Wisconsin and Iowa became 
comparatively densely populated within a few years, and all the 
upper Mississippi states received immigrants in significantly larger 
numbers. The working of the mines on Lake Superior and the rising 
corn production in the, whole area of the Lakes gave trade and 
shipping on this major inland waterway system a new impulse which 
will be further increased as a result of an act passed by the last session 
of Congress greatly facilitating trade with Canada and Nova Scotia. 
Whilst the north-western states have thus acquired importance of a 
quite new order, Oregon has been colonised within a few years, 
Texas and New Mexico annexed and California conquered. The 
discovery of the Californian gold- mines set the seal on the prosperity 
of America. In the second issue of this Revue” we have already 
pointed out, before any other European periodical, the importance 
of the discovery and the consequences it is bound to have for the 
whole of world trade. This importance lies not in the increase in the 
amount of gold through the discovery of new mines, although this 
increase in the means of exchange could certainly not fail to have a 
positive effect on trade in general either. It lies in the incentive which 
the mineral wealth of California gave to capital on the world market, 
in the activity which was generated throughout the west coast 
of America and the east coast of Asia, in the new market for goods 
which was created in California and in all the countries within 
California’s influence. The Californian markct is considerable enough 
by itself; a year ago there were 100,000 and now at least 300,000 
people there producing scarcely anything but gold, and exchang- 
ing this gold for all their requirements from markets else 
where. But the Californian market is insignificant compared with 
the continuing expansion of all the markets of the Pacific Ocean, 
compared with the striking growth in trade in Chile and Peru, 
in Western Mexico and on the Sandwich Islands,* and compared 
with the sudden development of Asian and Australian traffic with 

* In Engels’ copy of the “Review” the word Uberwachung (control) is replaced by 
Urbarmachung (reclamation).— Ed. 
See this volume, pp. 265-66.— Ed. 
“ Now the Hawaiian Islands.— Ed. 

Review 505 

California. California has created a need for totally new lines of 
world communication, lines which are bound shortly to exceed all 
others in importance. The main trade route to the Pacific Ocean, 
which has only now really been opened up and which is becoming 
the most important ocean in the world, will henceforth cross the 
Isthmus of Panama. The establishment of communications on this 
isthmus by means of roads, railways and canals has now become the 
most urgent requirement of world trade and is already being tackled 
in some places. The railway from Chagres to Panama is already being 
built. An American company is having the area of the San Juan de 
Nicaragua River surveyed in order to connect the two oceans initially 
by an overland route and subsequently by a canal at this point. Other 
routes, such as that across the Isthmus of Darien, the Atrato route in 
New Granada? and that across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, are 
being discussed in British and American papers. In view of the whole 
civilised world’s newly and suddenly revealed ignorance of the 
nature of the terrain in Central America, it is impossible to decide 
which route is the most advantageous for a large canal; to judge by 
the few facts that are known, the Atrato route and the route across 
Panama are the most promising. In connection with the communi- 
cations across the isthmus, the rapid expansion of ocean steam 
navigation has become equally pressing. Steamships already ply 
between Southampton and Chagres, New York and Chagres, Val- 
paraiso, Lima, Panama, Acapulco and San Francisco; but these few 
lines with their small number of steamers are far from adequate. It is 
becoming daily more necessary to supplement the steamship services 
between Europe and Chagres, and the growing traffic between Asia, 
Australia and America is demanding new, large-scale steamship 
services from Panama and San Francisco to Canton, Singapore, 
Sydney, New Zealand and the most important port-of-call in the 
Pacific Ocean, the Sandwich Islands. Of all areas of the Pacific 
Ocean, Australia and New Zealand in particular have made the 
greatest advance, both on account of the rapid progress of 
colonisation and on account of the influence of California, and will 
not stand a moment longer being isolated from the civilised world by 
a four- to six-month voyage by sail. The total population of the 
Australian colonies (not including New Zealand) rose from 170, 676 
(1839) to 333,764 in 1848, thus increasing by 95'/o per cent in 9 
years. Great Britain herself cannot -leave these colonies without a 
steamer connection; the government is negotiating at this moment 
for a line to join up with the East Indian overland post, and whether 

* Name changed to Colombia in 1863.— Ed. 

this comes about or not, the need for a steamer connection with 
America and especially California, which was the destination of 
3,500 emigrants from Australia last year, will soon take care of itself. 
One can really say that the earth has only begun to become round 
since this world-wide ocean steam navigation has become necessary. 

This imminent expansion of steamship services will be further 
intensified by the above-mentioned opening up of the Dutch 
colonies and by the increased number of propeller-driven steam- 
ships which, it is becoming more and more evident, can transport 
emigrants faster, relatively more cheaply and more conveniently 
than sailing ships. In addition to the propeller-driven steamers which 
_ already go from Glasgow and Liverpool to New York, new ones are 
to be brought into service on this line, and a line is to be established 
between Rotterdam and New York. The extent indeed to which 
ocean steam navigation at present tends to be a target for capital is 
demonstrated by the continuing increase in the number of steamers 
competing on’ the run between Liverpool and New York, the 
establishment of quite new lines from Great Britain to the Cape and 
from New York to Le Havre, and a whole series of similar projects 
which are now being peddled about in New York. | 

With this flow of capital into overseas steamship services and the 
canalisation of the American isthmus, the foundation has already 
been laid for over-speculation in this field. The centre for this 
speculation is inevitably New York, which receives the bulk of the 
gold from California and which has already attracted most of the 
trade with California to itself and indeed plays the same role relative 
to the whole of America as London does relative to Europe. New 
York is already the centre for all the transatlantic steamship serv- 
ices; all the steamships in the Pacific Ocean belong to New York 
companies, and almost all new projects in this field emanate from 
New York. Speculation in overseas steamer services has already 
begun in New York. The Nicaragua Company, which originated in 
New York, likewise represents the beginning of speculation in the 
isthmus canals. Over-speculation will develop very soon, and even 
if British capital becomes involved on a large scale in all such 
undertakings, even if the London Stock Exchange is overwhelmed 
with similar projects of every kind, nevertheless this time New York 
will remain the centre of the whole swindle’ and, as in 1836, will be 
the first to suffer when it collapses. Countless projects will be ruined, 
but like the British railway system in 1845, this time the outline 
at least of world-wide steam navigation will emerge from this 

* Here Engels’. copy has “1857” in the margin.— Ed. 

Review 507 

over-speculation. However many companies go bankrupt, the 
steamships which are doubling traffic across the Atlantic, which are 
opening up the Pacific Ocean and are linking Australia, New 
Zealand, Singapore and China with America and reducing the 
length of a voyage round the world to four months—these will 
remain. 

The prosperity of Great Britain and America soon had repercus- 
sions on the European continent. As early as the summer of 1849 
factories in Germany, especially in the Rhine Province, were once 
more fairly busy, and from the end of 1849 the revival of business 
was general. This renewed prosperity, which our German burghers 
naively attribute to the establishment of peace and order, is in reality 
based solely on the renewed prosperity of Great Britain and the 
increased demand for industrial goods on the American and tropical 
markets. In 1850 industry and trade made yet further advances; 
exactly as in Great Britain there occurred a momentary surplus of 
capital and an extraordinary easing of the money market, and 
reports on the autumn fairs in Frankfurt and Leipzig sound ex- 
tremely satisfactory to those members of the bourgeoisie who have a 
stake in them. Not for an instant were the disturbances in Schles- 
wig-Holstein and Hesse-Cassel, the disputes concerning the union 
and the threatening notes sent by Austria and Prussia” able to 
hold up the development of all these symptoms of prosperity, as The 
Economist indeed observed’ in its supercilious cockney” way. 

The same symptoms have shown themselves in France since 1849, 
and particularly since the beginning of 1850.° The Parisian 
industries are abundantly employed and the cotton factories of 
Rouen and Mulhouse are also doing pretty well, although here, as in 
England, the high prices of the raw material have exercised a 
retarding influence. The development of prosperity in France was, 
in addition, especially promoted by the comprehensive tariff reform 
in Spain and by the reduction of the duties on various luxury articles 
in Mexico; the export of French commodities to both markets has 
considerably increased. The growth of capital in France led to a 
series of speculations, for which the large-scale exploitation of 
the Californian gold-mines served as a pretext. A swarm of 
companies has sprung up, the low denomination of whose shares 

* “Spirit of the Trade Circulars”, The Economist No. 366, August 31, 1850. 

> The authors use the English word .— Ed. 

“ In 1895 Engels included the section on the economic position of France 
up to the words “We now come to the political events...” in Chapter IV of 
Marx’s The Class Struggles in France (see this volume, pp. 132-35).— Ed. 

and whose socialist-coloured prospectuses appeal directly to the 
purses of the petty bourgeois and the workers, but which one and 
all result in that sheer swindling which is characteristic of the 
French and Chinese alone. One of these companies is even 
patronised directly by the government. The import duties in France 
during the first nine months of 1848 amounted to 63,000,000 francs, 
of 1849 to 95,000,000 francs and of 1850 to 93,000,000 francs. 
Moreover, in the month of September 1850, they again rose by more 
than a million compared with the same month of 1849. Exports also 
rose in 1849, and still more in 1850. 

The most striking proof of restored prosperity is the bank’s 
reintroduction of specie payment by the law of August 6, 1850. On 
March 15, 1848, the bank had been authorised to suspend specie 
payment. Its note circulation, including the provincial banks, 
amounted at that time to 373,000,000 francs (£14,920,000). On 
November 2, 1849, this circulation amounted to 482,000,000 francs, 
or £19,280,000, an increase of £4,360,000, and on September 2, 
1850, to 496,000,000 francs, or £19,840,000, an increase of about 
£5,000,000. This was not accompanied by any devaluation of the 
notes; on the contrary, the increased circulation of the notes was 
accompanied by the steadily increasing accumulation of gold and 
silver in the vaults of the bank, so that in the summer of 1850 its 
metallic reserve amounted to about £14,000,000, an unprecedented 
sum in France. That the bank was thus placed in a position to 
increase its circulation and therewith its active capital by 123,000,000 
francs, or £5,000,000, is striking proof of the correctness of our 
_ assertion in an earlier issue’ that the finance aristocracy has not only 
not been overthrown by the revolution, but has even been 
strengthened. This result becomes still more evident from the 
following survey of French bank legislation during the last few years. 
On June 10, 1847, the bank was authorised to issue notes of 200 
francs; hitherto the smallest denomination had been 500 francs. A 
decree of March 15, 1848, declared the notes of the Bank of France 
legal tender and relieved the bank of the obligation of redeeming 
them in specie. Its note issue was limited to 350,000,000 francs. It 
was simultaneously authorised to issue notes of 100 francs. A decree 
of April 27 prescribed the merging of the departmental banks in the 
Bank of France; another decree, of May 2, 1848, increased the 
latter’s note issue to 452,000,000 francs. A decree of December 22, 
1849, raised the maximum of the note issue to 525,000,000 francs. 

* See pp. 114-18 (the reference is to the third issue of the Revue).— Ed. 

Review 509 

Finally, the law of August 6, 1850, re-established the exchangeability 
of notes for specie. These facts, the continual increase in the 
circulation, the concentration of the whole of French credit in the 
hands of the bank and the accumulation of all French gold and silver 
in the bank’s vaults, led M. Proudhon to the conclusion that the bank 
must now shed its old snakeskin and metamorphose itself into a 
Proudhonist people’s bank.** He did not even need to know the 
history of the restriction on the English bank from 1797-1819°*°; 
he only needed to direct his glance across the Channel to see that 
this fact, for him unprecedented in the history of bourgeois society, 
was nothing more than a very normal bourgeois event, which now 
only occurred in France for the first time. One sees that the allegedly 
revolutionary theoreticians who, after the Provisional Government, 
talked big in Paris, were just as ignorant of the nature and the results 
of the measures taken as the gentlemen of the Provisional 
Government themselves. : 

In spite of the industrial and commercial prosperity that France 
momentarily enjoys, the mass of the people, the twenty-five million 
peasants, suffer from a great depression. The good harvests of the 
last few years have forced the prices of corn in France much lower 
even than in England, and the position of the peasants under such 
circumstances, in debt, sucked dry by usury and crushed by taxes, 
must be anything but splendid. The history of the last three years 
has, however, provided sufficient proof that this class of the 
population is absolutely incapable of any revolutionary initiative. 

Just as the period of crisis occurs Jater on the Continent than in 
England, so does that of prosperity. The original process always 
takes place in England; it is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. 
On the Continent, the different phases of the cycle through which 
bourgeois society is ever speeding anew occur in secondary and 
tertiary form. First, the Continent exported incomparably more to 
England than to any other country. This export to England, 
however, in turn depends on the position of England, particularly 
with regard to the overseas market. ‘Then England exports to the 
overseas lands incomparably more than the entire Continent, so that 
the quantity of Continental exports to these lands is always 
dependent on England’s overseas exports at the time. While, 
therefore, the crises first produce revolutions on the Continent, the 
foundation for these is, nevertheless, always laid in England. Violent 
outbreaks must naturally occur rather in the extremities of the 
bourgeois body than in its heart, since the possibility of adjustment is 
greater here than there. On the other hand, the degree to which 
Continental revolutions react on England is at the same time the 

barometer which indicates how far these revolutions really call in 
question the bourgeois conditions of life, or how far they only hit 
their political formations. 

With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of 
bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within 
bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. 
Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these fac- 
tors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production, 
come in collision with each other. The various quarrels in which the 
representatives of the individual factions of the Continental party of 
Order now indulge and mutually compromise themselves, far from 
providing the occasion for new revolutions are, on the contrary, 
possible only because the basis of the relationships is momentarily so 
secure and, what the reaction does not know, so bourgeois. All 
reactionary attempts to hold up bourgeois development will rebound 
off it just as certainly as all moral indignation and all enthusiastic 
proclamations of the democrats. A new revolution is possible only in 
consequence of a new crisis. It 1s, however, just as certain as this crisis. 

We now come to the political events of the last six months. 

As far as Great Britain is concerned, each spell of prosperity is a 
time when Whiggery comes into its own, having its proper incar- 
nation in Lord John Russell, the smallest man in the kingdom. 
The ministry brings before Parliament little hole-and-corner reform 
bills which it knows will be rejected by the Upper House or which 
it withdraws itself at the end of the session on the pretext of 
insufficient time. The lack of time however always arises because of 
the preceding superabundance of tedium and empty talk, which the 
Speaker terminates as late as possible with the observation that that is 
not the matter before the House. The struggle between Free-traders 
and Protectionists degenerates into pure humbug at such times. The 
majority of Free-traders are too busy with the material exploitation 
of free trade to have the time or inclination to fight more astutely* 
for its political implications; the Protectionists, faced with the 
upsurge of urban industry, are reduced to the most absurd cries of 
woe and threats. The parties continue their war simply for the sake 
of appearances, so that neither side shall ever forget the existence of 
the other. Before the last session the industrial bourgeoisie made a 
great noise in favour of financial reform; in Parliament itself they 
confined themselves to theoretical expostulations. Before the session 
Mr. Cobden repeated his declaration of war on the Tsar apropos of 

* Engels in his copy replaced the word weiser (more astutely) by weiter 
(further).— Ed. 

Review «2611 

the Russian loan and could not find sarcasms enough to heap on the 
great pauper* of Petersburg; six months later he descended to the 
scandalous farce of the Peace Congress,” whose only outcome was 
that an Ojibway Indian” handed a pipe of peace to Mr. Jaup, to the 
great horror of Herr Haynau, who was present on the platform, 
and that the Yankee moderation-monger Elihu Burritt went to 
Schleswig-Holstein and Copenhagen to assure the governments 
concerned of his good intentions. As though the whole Schleswig- 
Holstein war could ever take a serious turn as long as Herr von Ga- 
gern is involved in it and Venedey is not! 

In fact the great political issue of the past session was the Greek 
debate.**’ All the absolutist reactionaries on the Continent had 
formed a coalition with the British Tories to overthrow Palmerston. 
Louis Napoleon had even recalled the French Ambassador‘ from 
London, as much to flatter Tsar Nicholas as French national vanity. 
The whole National Assembly fanatically applauded this bold break 
with the traditional British alliance. The affair gave Mr. Palmerston 
the opportunity to present himself in the Lower House as the 
champion of civil liberty throughout Europe; he obtained a majority 
of 46 votes, and the result of the coalition, which was as powerless as 
it was silly, was the non-renewal of the Alien Bill.3°8 

If in his display against Greece and in his speech in Parliament 
Palmerston adopted a bourgeois-liberal stand vis-a-vis the reac- 
tionaries of Europe, the British people used the presence of Herr 
Haynau in London for a striking display of their foreign pol- 
ic 359 
TE the people harried Austria’s military representative through the 
streets of London, Prussia experienced in the person of its 
diplomatic representative a misfortune equally appropriate to its 
position. One remembers how Britain’s most comic figure, the 
loquacious littérateur Brougham, drove the littérateur Bunsen from 
the galleries of the Upper House for his tactlessly importunate 
behaviour, amid general laughter from all the ladies. Herr Bunsen, 
very much in the spirit of the Great Power he was representing, took 
this humiliation calmly. He refuses to leave Britain, come what may. 
All his private interests bind him to Great Britain; he will continue to 
exploit his diplomatic post for the purpose of speculation in English 
religion and to find a niche for his sons in the English Church and 
for his daughters in one of the echelons of the English gentry. 

* “Mr. Cobden and the Russian Loan”, The Times No. 20390, January 19, 
1850.— Ed. 

> Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh.— Ed. 

© Drouyn de Lhuys.— Ed. 

The death of Sir Robert Peel significantly helped to hasten the 
dissolution of the old parties. The party which formed his main 
support since 1845, the so-called Peelites, has subsequently fallen 
apart completely. Since his death Peel himself has been most 
fulsomely apotheosised by almost all the parties as Britain’s greatest 
statesman. It is true he has the advantage over the “statesmen” of the 
Continent of not being merely a job-hunter. Apart from that, the 
statesmanship of this son of the bourgeoisie who rose to be leader of 
the landed aristocracy consisted in the realisation that nowadays 
there remains only one real aristocracy, and that is the bourgeoisie. 
Having this in mind, he continually used his leadership of the landed 
aristocracy to force it to make concessions to the bourgeoisie. Thus it 
was with the Catholic emancipation and the police reform, by which 
he increased the political power of the bourgeoisie; with the bank 
laws of 1818 and 1844, which strengthened the finance aristocracy; 
with the tariff reform of 1842 and the free-trade laws of 1846, by 
which the landed aristocracy was positively sacrificed to the 
industrial bourgeoisie. The second main pillar of the aristocracy, 
the “Iron Duke”, the hero of Waterloo, stood like a disappointed 
Don Quixote loyally by the side of the cotton-knight Peel. From 1845 
Peel was treated as a traitor by the Tory party. Peel’s power over the 
Lower House was based on the unusual plausibility of his eloquence. If 
one reads his most famous speeches, one finds that they consist of a 
massive accumulation of commonplaces, skilfully interspersed with a 
number of statistical data. There is scarcely a town in England which 
does not want to set up a monument to the man who abolished 
customs'duty on corn. A Chartist paper, alluding to the police force 
developed by Peel in 1829, observed: What need have we of all these 
monuments to Peel? Every policeman in Britain and Ireland is a 
living monument to him.’ 

The most recent event to have excited public interest in Great 
Britain is the appointment of Mr. Wiseman as Cardinal Archbishop 
of Westminster and the division of Britain into thirteen Catholic 
bishoprics by the Pope.” This act of Christ’s vicar on earth, which 
caused the Church of England great astonishment, is a further 
demonstration of the illusion to which all the reactionaries on the 
Continent are prey, as though the victories which they have recently 
won in the service of the bourgeoisie would automatically entail the 
establishment of a whole feudal-absolutist social order with all its 
religious trappings. Catholicism’s sole support in Britain is to be 

“ “The Peel Monument”, The Red Republican No. 9, August 17, 1850.— Ed. 
> Pius IX.— Ed. 

Review 513 

found at the two extremes of society, the aristocracy and the lumpen- 
proletariat. The lumpenproletariat, the riff-raff of Irish origin or 
descended from Irishmen, is Catholic by descent. The aristocra- 
cy has for so long, indulged in the fashionable flirtation with 
Puseyism **' that ultimately actual conversion to the Catholic Church 
began to become the fashion. At a time when the struggle against the 
advancing bourgeoisie was increasingly driving the British aristocra- 
cy to display its feudal character, the struggle against the theologians 
of the bourgeois dissenting religion*”* was of course increasing- 
ly forcing the aristocracy’s religious ideologists, the orthodox 
theologians of the High Church, inevitably to acknowledge the 
implications of their semi-Catholic dogma and rites, and actual 
conversions of individual reactionary Anglicans to that first Church 
which alone assures salvation inevitably became more and more 
common. These insignificant events generated the most sanguine 
hopes in the minds of Catholic priests in Britain that the whole of 
Great Britain would soon be converted. The recent Papal Bull? 
which already treats Great Britain once more as a province of Rome 
and which was intended to lend new impetus to this wave of 
conversions, is however producing precisely the contrary effect. The 
Puseyites, suddenly confronted with the grave consequences of their 
medieval dallyings, are starting back in horror, and the Puseyite 
bishop of London” has at once issued a declaration in which he 
recants all his errors and declares a war to the death on the 
papacy.‘—As far as the bourgeoisie is concerned the whole farce is 
of interest only insofar as it provides an opportunity for new attacks 
on the High Church and its universities. The Commission of Enquiry 
which is to report on the state of the universities will provoke violent 
debates in the next session. The mass of the people has of course no 
feelings either for or against Cardinal Wiseman. The newspapers, on 
the other hand, find the material he is providing for long articles and 
violent diatribes against Pio Nono“ most welcome, in view of the 
present dearth of news. The Times even demanded that by way of 
punishment for his presumption the government should incite an 
insurrection in the Papal States and let loose Mr. Mazzini and the 
Italian émigrés on him. The Globe, Palmerston’s paper, drew an 
extremely witty parallel between the Papal Bull and Mazzini’s latest 

@ Of September 29, 1850.— Ed. 

P Charles James Blomfield.— Ed. 

a Rey of the Bishop of London to the Memorial from the Westminster Clergy.— Ed. 
¢ Pius [X.— Ed. 

© The Times No. 20634, October 31, 1850.— Ed. 

manifesto.* The Pope, it said, lays claim to spiritual supremacy over 
Great Britain and is appointing bishops in partibus infidelium. Here in 
London there is an Italian Government in partibus infidelium, with the 
Antipope, Mr. Mazzini, at its head. The supremacy which Mr.Mazzini 
not merely lays claim to but actually exercises in the Papal States, is at 
_ present likewise purely spiritual. The Papal Bulls are purely religious 
in content; Mazzini’s manifestos likewise. They preach a religion, 
they appeal to faith, their motto is: Dio ed il popolo, God and the 
people. We would ask, is there any other difference between the 
claims of the two parties than this, that Mr. Mazzini at least 
represents the religion of the majority of the people he is ad- 
dressing—for there is scarcely any other religion left in Italy now 
than that of Dio ed il popolo—whereas the Pope does not? Mazzini 
incidentally has used this opportunity to progress a step further. In 
conjunction with the other members of the Italian National Com- 
mittee, he has in fact now announced from London the 10 million 
fr. loan, approved by the Constituent Assembly in Rome, in the 
form of 100 fr. shares, for the express purpose of obtaining arms 
and military equipment. It cannot be denied that this loan has a 
greater chance of success than the Austrian Government’s unsuccess- 
ful voluntary loan in Lombardy.*™ | 

A really serious blow which Great Britain has recently dealt Rome 
and Austria is its trade agreement with Sardinia. This agreement 
shatters Austria’s project for an Italian customs union and ensures 
an important field of activity for British trade and Britain’s bour- 
geois policies in Upper Italy. 

The present organisation of the Chartist Party is similarly in a state 
of dissolution. The members of the petty bourgeoisie who still 
' adhere to the party, together with the labour aristocracy, form 
a purely democratic faction whose programme is limited to the 
People’s Charter and a number of other petty-bourgeois reforms. 
The mass of the workers who live in truly proletarian conditions 
belong to the revolutionary Chartist faction. The leader of the 
former faction is Feargus O’Connor, and the leaders of the latter are 
Julian Harney and Ernest Jones. The elderly O’Connor, an Irish 
squire and self-styled descendant of the old kings of Munster, is a 
true representative of Old England, despite his origin and his 
political tendencies. His whole nature is conservative and he most 
emphatically hates both industrial progress and revolution. All his 
ideals are patriarchal and petty-bourgeois to the core. He unites in 

The Globe and Traveller No. 15318, October 26, 1850.— Ed. 

Review 515 

himself countless contradictions which are resolved and harmonised 
in the form of a certain banal common sense? and which enable him 
year in, year out to write his endless weekly letters in The Northern 
Star, each of which is in open conflict with its predecessor. And that is 
precisely why O’Connor claims to be the most consistent man in the 
three kingdoms and to have predicted every event for the past 
twenty years. His shoulders, his bellowing voice, his enormous skill as 
a boxer, with which he is reputed to have once held his own against 
over twenty thousand people at Nottingham market, all make him a 
typical representative of Old England. It is obvious that a man like 
O’Connor is bound to be a great obstacle in a revolutionary move- 
ment; but such people are useful precisely because with them and 
against them a number of ingrained prejudices are frittered away, 
and because the movement, if it eventually prevails against these 
people, is once and for all rid also of the prejudices they represent. 
O’Connor’s fate is sealed in the movement, but for that reason he will 
be able to lay claim to the title of a “martyr to the good cause” with 
as much right as Messrs. Lamartine and Marrast. 

The main bone of contention between the two Chartist factions is 
the land question. O’Connor and his party want to use the Charter to 
accommodate some of the workers on small plots of land and 
eventually to parcel out all the land in Great Britain. We know how 
his attempt to organise this parcelling out on a small scale by means 
of a joint-stock company failed. That propensity which every 
bourgeois revolution has to break up large landed estates. gave the 
British workers the impression for a while that this parcelling out 
was something revolutionary, although its regular corollary is the 
unfailing tendency of small properties to become concentrated and 
succumb in the face of large-scale farming. The revolutionary 
faction of the Chartists opposes this demand for parcelling out with 
the demand for the confiscation of all landed property, and insists 
that it should not be distributed but remain national property. 

Despite this split and their more extreme demands, the memory of 
the circumstances in which the abolition of the Corn Laws went 
through is responsible for the Chartists’ persisting notion that in the 
next crisis they will once again have to ally themselves with the 
industrial bourgeoisie, the financial reformers, and help them to 
crush their enemies, in return for which they will have to extract 
concessions from them for themselves. This will in any case be the 
Chartists’ position in the approaching crisis. The revolutionary 
movement proper cannot begin in Britain until the Charter has been 

4 The authors give the words “common sense” in English.— Ed. 

carried through, just as in France the battle of June only became 
possible when the republic had been won. 

Let us now turn to France.* 

The victory that the people, in conjunction with the petty 
bourgeois, had won in the elections of March 10 was annulled by 
it itself when it provoked the new election of April 28. Vidal was 
elected not only in Paris, but also in the Lower Rhine. The Paris 
Committee, in which the Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie were 
strongly represented, induced him to accept for the Lower Rhine. 
The victory of March 10 ceased to be a decisive one; the date of 
the decision was once more postponed; the tension of the people 
was relaxed; it became accustomed to legal triumphs instead 
of revolutionary ones. The revolutionary meaning of March 10, 
the rehabilitation of the June insurrection, was finally completely 
annihilated by the candidature of Eugéne Sue, the sentimental 
petty-bourgeois social-fantasist, which the proletariat could at best 
accept as a joke to amuse the grisettes. As against this well-meaning 
candidature, the party of Order, emboldened by the vacillating 
policy of its opponents, put up a candidate who was to represent the 
June victory. This comic candidate was the Spartan pater familias 
Leclerc, from whose person, however, the heroic armour was torn 
piece by piece by the press, and who experienced a crushing defeat in 
the election. The new election victory on April 28 put the Montagne 
and the petty bourgeoisie in high feather. They already exulted in 
the thought of being able to arrive at the goal of their wishes in a 
purely legal way and without again pushing the proletariat into the 
foreground through a new revolution; they reckoned positively on 
bringing M. Ledru-Rollin into the presidential chair and a majority 
of Montagnards into the Assembly through universal suffrage in the 
new elections of 1852. The party of Order, rendered perfectly 
certain, by the prospective elections, by Sue’s candidature and by the 
mood of the Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie, that the latter were 
resolved to remain quiet no matter what happened, answered the 
two election victories with an election law which abolished universal 
suffrage. 

The government took good care not to make this legislative pro- 
posal on its own responsibility. It made an apparent concession to the 
majority by entrusting the drafting of the bill to the high dig- 
nitaries of this majority, to the seventeen burgraves.**” Thus, it was 
not the government that proposed the repeal of universal suffrage 
to the Assembly; the majority of the Assembly proposed it to itself. 

2 In 1895 Engels included the passage relating to the events in France in Chapter 
IV of Marx’s The Class Struggles in France (see pp. 135-45 of this volume).— Ed. 

Review 517 

On May 8, the project was brought into the Chamber. The entire 
social-democratic press rose as one man in order to preach to the 
people dignified composure, calme majestueux,* passivity and trust in 
its representatives. Every article of these journals was a confession 
that a revolution would, above all, annihilate the so-called revolu- 
tionary press and that, therefore, it was now a question of its 
self-preservation. The allegedly revolutionary press betrayed its 
whole secret. It signed its own death warrant. 

On May 21, the Montagne put the preliminary question to debate 
and moved the rejection of the whole project on the ground that it 
violated the constitution. The party of Order answered that the 
constitution would be violated if it were necessary; there was, how- 
ever, no need for this at present, because the constitution was 
capable of every interpretation, and because the majority alone was 
competent to decide on the correct interpretation. To the unbridled, 
savage attacks of Thiers and Montalembert the Montagne opposed a 
decorous and refined humanism. It took its stand on the ground of 
law; the party of Order referred it to the ground on which the law 
grows, to bourgeois property. The Montagne whimpered: Did they 
really want, then, to conjure up revolutions by main force? The party 
of Order replied: One should await them. 

On May 22, the preliminary question was settled by 462 votes to 
227. The same men who had proved with such solemn profundity 
that the National Assembly and every individual deputy would be 
renouncing his mandate if he renounced the people, his mandator, 
stuck to their seats and now suddenly sought to let the country act, 
through petitions at that, instead of acting themselves; and still sat 
there unmoved when, on May 31, the law went through in splendid 
fashion.** They sought to revenge themselves by a protest in which 
they recorded their innocence of the rape of the constitution, a 
protest which they did not even submit openly, but smuggled into 
the President’s” pocket behind his back. 

An army of 150,000 men in Paris, the long deferment of the 
decision, the appeasing attitude of the press, the pusillanimity of the 
Montagne and of the newly elected representatives, the majestic calm 
of the petty bourgeois, but, above all, the commercial and industrial 
prosperity, prevented any attempt at revolution on the part of the 
proletariat. 

Universal suffrage had fulfilled its mission. The majority of the 
people had passed through the school of development, which is all 

@ An allusion to Victor Hugo’s appeal to keep “majestic calm”, made in his speech 
in the Legislative Assembly on May 21, 1850.— Ed. 
> The President of the Assembly.— Ed. 

that universal suffrage can serve for in a revolutionary period. It had 
to be set aside by a revolution or by the reaction. 

The Montagne developed a still greater display of energy on an 
occasion that arose soon afterwards. From the tribune War Minister 

d’Hautpoul had termed the February Revolution a baneful catas- 
trophe.* The orators of the Montagne, who, as always, distinguished 
themselves by their morally indignant bluster, were not allowed by 
the President, Dupin, to speak. Girardin proposed to the Montagne 
that it should walk out at once en masse. Result: the Montagne re- 
mained seated, but Girardin was cast out from its midst as un- 
worthy. 

The election law still needed one thing to complete it, a new press 
law. This was not long in coming. A proposal of the government, 
made many times more drastic by amendments of the party of 
Order, increased the caution money, put an extra stamp on 
feuilleton novels (answer to the election of Eugéne Sue), taxed all 
publications appearing weekly or monthly up to a certain number of 
sheets and finally provided that every article of a journal must bear 
the signature of the author. The provisions concerning the caution 
money killed the so-called revolutionary press; the people regarded 
its extinction as satisfaction for the abolition of universal suffrage. 
However, neither the tendency nor the effect of the new law ex- 
tended only to this section of the press. As long as the newspaper 
press was anonymous, it appeared as the organ of a numberless and 
nameless public opinion; it was the third power in the state. Through 
the signature of every article, a newspaper became a mere collection 
of literary contributions from more or less known individuals. Ev- 
ery article sank to the level of an advertisement. Hitherto the 
newspapers had circulated as the paper money of public opinion; 
now they were resolved into more or less bad solo bills, whose worth 
and circulation depended on the credit not only of the drawer but 
also of the endorser. The press of the party of Order had agitated 
not only for the repeal of universal suffrage but also for the most 
extreme measures against the bad press. However, in its sinister 
anonymity even the good press was irksome to the party of Order 
and still more to its individual provincial representatives. As for 
itself, it demanded only the paid writer, with name, address and 
description. In vain the good press bemoaned the ingratitude with 
which its services were rewarded. The law went through; the 
specification of the names of authors hit it hardest of all. The 
names of republican journalists were pretty well known; but the 

* This statement was made by the Minister of Justice Eugene Rouher.— Ed. 

Review | 9 

respectable firms of the Journal des Débats, the Assemblée nationale, 
the Constitutionnel, etc., etc., cut a sorry figure in their high 
protestations of state wisdom, when the mysterious company all at 
once disintegrated into purchasable penny-a-liners? of long practice, 
who had defended all possible causes’ for cash, like Granier de 
Cassagnac, or into old milksops who called themselves statesmen, like 
Capefigue, or into coquettish fops, like M. Lemoinne of the Débats. 

In the debate on the press law the Montagne had already sunk to 
such a level of moral degeneracy that it had to confine itself to 
applauding the brilliant tirades of an old notability of Louis Phi- 
lippe’s time, M. Victor Hugo. 

With the election law and the press law the revolutionary and 
democratic party exits from the official stage. Before their departure 
home, shortly after the end of the session, the two factions of the 
Montagne, the socialist democrats and the democratic Socialists, 
issued two manifestos, two testimonia paupertatis, in which they 
proved that while power and success were never on their side, they 
nonetheless had ever been on the side of eternal justice and all 
the other eternal truths.” 

Let us now consider the party of Order. The Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung had said (Heft 3, p. 16): “As against the hankering for 
restoration on the part of the united Orleanists and Legitimists, 
Bonaparte defends his title to his actual power, the republic; as 
against the hankering for restoration on the part of Bonaparte, the 
party of Order defends its title to its common rule, the republic. As 
against the Orleanists, the Legitimists, and as against the Legitimists, 
the Orleanists, defend the status quo, the republic. All these factions 
of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its 
own restoration in petto, mutually enforce, as against their rivals’ 
hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the 
bourgeoisie, the form in which the special claims remain neutralised 
and reserved —the republic.... And Thiers spoke more truly than he 
suspected when he said: ‘We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the 
constitutional republic.’”’‘ 

This comedy of the républicains malgré eux,’ the antipathy to the 
status quo and the constant consolidation of it; the incessant friction 

2 This expression is given in English in the original.— Ed. 
“Compte-rendu de la Montagne au Peuple” and “Au Peuple!”, published in the 
newspaper Le Peuple de 1850 No. 6, August 11, en No. 7, August 14, 1850.— Ed. 
© See this volume, p. 113-14.— Ed. 
Republicans in spite of themselves. (Allusion to ) Moliare’ s comedy Le Médecin 
malgré lui.) — Ed. 

520 . Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 

between Bonaparte and the National Assembly; the ever renewed 
threat of the party of Order to split into its separate component 
parts, and the ever repeated conjugation of its factions; the attempt 
of each faction to transform each victory over the common foe into a 
defeat for its temporary allies; the mutual petty jealousy, chicanery, 
harassment, the tireless drawing of swords that ever and again ends 
with a baiser-Lamourette —this whole unedifying comedy of errors 
never developed more classically than during the last six months. 

The party of Order regarded the election law at the same time as a 
victory over Bonaparte. Had not the government abdicated when it 
handed over the editing of and responsibility for its own proposal to 
the Commission of Seventeen? And did not the chief strength of 
Bonaparte as against the Assembly lie in the fact that he was the 
chosen of six millions? — Bonaparte, on his part, treated the election 
law as a concession to the Assembly, with which he claimed to have 
purchased harmony between the legislative and executive powers. As 
reward, the vulgar adventurer demanded an increase of three 
millions in his civil list. Dared the National Assembly enter into a 
conflict with the executive at a moment when it had excommuni- 
cated the great majority of Frenchmen? It was roused to anger: it 
appeared to want to go to extremes; its Commission rejected the 
motion; the Bonapartist press threatened, and referred to the 
disinherited people, deprived of its franchise; numerous noisy 
attempts at an arrangement took place, and the Assembly finally 
gave way in fact, but at the same time revenged itself in principle. 
Instead of increasing the civil list in principle by three millions per 
annum, it granted him an accommodation of 2,160,000 francs. Not 
satisfied with this, it made even this concession only after it had been 
supported by Changarnier, the general of the party of Order and the 
protector thrust upon Bonaparte. Therefore it really granted the 
two millions not to Bonaparte, but to Changarnier. 

This sop, thrown to him de mauvaise grace? was accepted by 
Bonaparte quite in the spirit of the donor. The Bonapartist press 
blustered anew against the National Assembly. When, now in the 
debate on the press law, the amendment was passed on the sign- 
ing of names, which, in turn, was directed especially against the less 
important papers, the representatives of the private interests of 
Bonaparte, the principal Bonapartist paper, the Pouvoir, published 
an open and vehement attack on the National Assembly. The 
ministers had to disavow the paper before the Assembly; the 
managing editor of the Pouvoir was summoned before the bar of the 

* With a bad grace.— Ed. 

Review 52] 

National Assembly and sentenced to pay the highest fine, 5,000 
francs.* Next day, the Pouvoir published a still more insolent article 
against the Assembly, and, as the government’s revenge, the public 
prosecutor promptly prosecuted a number of Legitimist journals for 
violating the constitution. 

Finally there came the question ot proroguing the Chamber. 
Bonaparte desired this in order to be able to operate unhindered by 
the Assembly. The party of Order desired it, partly for the purpose 
of carrying on its factional intrigues, partly for the pursuit of the 
private interests of the individual deputies. Both needed it in order 
to consolidate and push further the victories of reaction in the 
provinces. The Assembly therefore adjourned from August 11 until 
November 11. Since, however, Bonaparte in no way concealed 
that his only concerti was to get rid of the irksome surveillance of 
the National Assembly, the Assembly imprinted on the vote of 
confidence itself the stamp of want of confidence in the Presi- 
dent. All Bonapartists were kept off the permanent commission of 
twenty-eight members, who stayed on during the recess as guardians 
of the virtue of the republic.*” In their stead, even some republicans 
of the Siécle and the National were elected to it, in order to prove to 
the President the attachment of the majority to the constitutional 
republic. 

Shortly before and, especially, immediately after the prorogation 
of the Chamber, the two big factions of the party of Order, the 
Orleanists and the Legitimists, appeared to want to be reconciled, 
and this by a fusion of the two royal houses under whose flags they 
were fighting. The papers were full of reconciliation proposals that 
were said to have been discussed at the sickbed of Louis Philippe at 
St. Leonards, when the death of Louis Philippe suddenly simplified 
the situation. Louis Philippe was the usurper; Henry V, the dis- 
possessed; the Count of Paris,” on the other hand, owing to the 
childlessness of Henry V, his lawful heir to the throne. Every pretext 
for objecting to a fusion of the two dynastic interests was now 
removed. But now, precisely, the two factions of the bourgeoisie first 
discovered that it was not zeal for a definite royal house that divided 
them, but that it was rather their divided class interests. that kept the 
two dynasties apart. The Legitimists, who had made a pilgrimage to 
the residence of Henry V at Wiesbaden just as their competitors had 
to St. Leonards, received there the news of Louis Philippe’s death. 

Forthwith they formed a ministry in partibus infidelium, which con- 

* See this volume, pp. 39-40 and 140.— Ed. 
Louis Philippe Albert d’Orléans.— Ed. 

sisted mostly of members of that commission of guardians of the vir- 
tue of the republic”’ and which on the occasion of a squabble in the 
bosom of the party came out with the most outspoken proclamation 
of right by the grace of God. The Orleanists rejoiced over the 
compromising scandal that this manifesto *” called forth in the press, 
and did not conceal for a moment their open enmity to the 
Legitimists. 

During the adjournment of the National Assembly, the Councils 
of the Departments met. The majority of them declared for a more 
or less qualified revision of the constitution, that is, they declared for 
a not definitely specified monarchist restoration, for a “solution”, and 
confessed at the same time that they were too incompetent and too 
cowardly to find this solution. The Bonapartist faction at once 
construed this desire for revision in the sense of a prolongation of 
Bonaparte’s presidency. 

The constitutional solution, the retirement of Bonaparte in May 
1852, the simultaneous election of a new President by all the electors 
of the country, the revision of the constitution by a Chamber of Revi- 
sion in the first months of the new presidency, is utterly inadmis- 
sible for the ruling class. The day of the new presidential election 
would be the day of rendezvous for all the hostile parties, the Le- 
gitimists, the Orleanists, the bourgeois republicans, the revolu- 
tionists. It would have to come to a violent decision between the 
different factions. Even if the party of Order should succeed in 
uniting round the candidature of a neutral person outside the 
dynastic families, he would still be opposed by Bonaparte. In its 
struggle with the people, the party of Order is compelled constantly 
to increase the power of the executive. Every increase of the 
executive’s power increases the power of its bearer, Bonaparte. In 
the same measure, therefore, as the party of Order strengthens its 
joint might, it strengthens the fighting resources of Bonaparte’s 
dynastic pretensions, it strengthens his chance of frustrating a 
constitutional solution by force on the day of the decision. He will 
then have, as against the party of Order, no more scruples about the 
one pillar of the constitution than that party had, as against the 
would, seemingly even against the Assembly, appeal to universal 
suffrage. In a word, the constitutional solution questions the entire 
political status quo and behind the jeopardising of the status quo the 
bourgeois sees chaos, anarchy, civil war. He sees his purchases and 
sales, his promissory notes, his marriages, his agreements, duly 
acknowledged before a notary, his mortgages, his ground rents, 
house rents, profits, all his contracts and sources of income called in 

Review 523 

question on the first Sunday in May 1852,°" and he cannot expose 
himself to this risk. Behind the jeopardising of the political status quo 
lurks the danger of the collapse of the entire bourgeois society. The 
only possible solution in the sense of the bourgeoisie is the post- 
ponement of the solution. It can save the constitutional republic 
only by a violation of the constitution, by the prolongation of the 
power of the President. This is also the last word of the press of 
Order, after the protracted and profound debates on the “solutions” 
in which it indulged after the session of the general councils. The 
high and mighty party of Order thus finds itself, to its shame, 
compelled to take seriously the ridiculous, commonplace and, to it, 
odious person of the pseudo-Bonaparte. 

This dirty figure likewise deceived himself concerning the causes 
that clothed him more and more with the character of the in- 
dispensable man. While his party had sufficient insight to ascribe 
the growing importance of Bonaparte to circumstances, he believed 
that he owed it solely to the magic power of his name and his 
continual caricaturing of Napoleon. He became more enterprising 
every day. To offset the pilgrimages to St. Leonards and Wiesbaden, 
he made his round trips through France. The Bonapartists had so 
little faith in the magic effect of his personality that they sent with 
him everywhere as claqueurs people from the Society of December 
10,° that organisation of the Paris lumpenproletariat, packed en masse 
into railway trains and post-chaises. They put speeches into the 
mouth of their marionette which, according to the reception in the 
different towns, proclaimed republican resignation or perennial 
tenacity as the keynote of the President’s policy. In spite of all 
manoeuvres these journeys were anything but triumphal proces- 
sions. 

When Bonaparte believed he had thus enthused the people, he set 
out to win the army. He caused great reviews to be held on the plain 
of Satory, near Versailles, at which he sought to buy the soldiers 
with garlic sausages, champagne and cigars. Whereas the genuine 
Napoleon, amid the hardships of his campaigns of conquest, knew 
how to cheer up his weary soldiers with outbursts of patriarchal 
familiarity, the pseudo-Napoleon believed it was in gratitude that the 
troops shouted: Vive Napoléon, vive le saucisson! that is, hurrah for the 
sausage [ Wurst], hurrah for the buffoon [Hanswurst]! 

These reviews led to the outbreak of the long suppressed dis- 
sension between Bonaparte and his War Minister d’Hautpoul, on 
the one hand, and Changarnier, on the other. In Changarnier, the 
party of Order had found its real neutral man, in whose case there 
could be no question of his own dynastic claims. It had designated 

him Bonaparte’s successor. In addition, Changarnier had become 
the great general of the party of Order through his conduct on 
January 29 and June 13, 1849, the modern Alexander, whose brutal 
intervention had, in the eyes of the timid bourgeois, cut the Gordian 
knot of the revolution. At bottom just as ridiculous as Bonaparte, he 
had thus become a power in the very cheapest manner and was set 
up by the National Assembly to watch the President. He him- 
self played the coquette, e.g., in the matter of the salary grant, with 
the protection that he gave Bonaparte, and rose up ever 
more overpoweringly against him and the ministers. When, on the 
occasion of the election law, an insurrection was expected, he 
forbade his officers to take any orders whatever from the War 
Minister or the President. The press was also instrumental in mag- 
nifying the figure of Changarnier. With the complete absence of 
great personalities, the party of Order naturally found itself com- 
pelled to endow a single individual with the strength lacking in 
its class as a whole and so puff up this individual to a prodigy. Thus 
arose the myth of Changarnier, the “ bulwark of society’. The arrogant 
charlatanry, the secretive air of importance with which Changarnier 
condescended to carry the world on his shoulders, forms the most 
ridiculous contrast to the events during and after the Satory review, 
which irrefutably proved that it needed only a stroke of the pen by 
Bonaparte, the infinitely little, to bring this fantastic offspring of 
bourgeois fear, the colossus Changarnier, back to the dimensions of 
mediocrity, and transform him, society’s heroic saviour, into a 
pensioned-off general. 

Bonaparte had for some time been revenging himself on Chan- 
garnier by provoking the War Minister to disputes in matters of 
discipline with the irksome protector. The last review of Satory 
finally brought the old animosity to a climax. The constitutional 
indignation of Changarnier knew no bounds when he saw the 
cavalry regiments file past with the unconstitutional cry: Vive 
l’Empereur! In order to forestall any unpleasant debate on this cry in 
the coming session of the Chamber, Bonaparte removed the War 
Minister d’Hautpoul by appointing him Governor of Algiers. In his 
place he put a reliable old general of the time of the empire,’ one 
who was fully a match for Changarnier in brutality. But so that the 
dismissal of d’Hautpoul might not appear as a concession to 
Changarnier, he simultaneously transferred General Neumayer, the 
right hand of the great saviour of society, from Paris to Nantes. It 

~ 2 J. P. Schramm.— Ed. 

Review 525 

had been Neumayer who at the last review had induced the whole of 
the infantry to file past the successor of Napoleon in icy silence. 
Changarnier, himself hit in the person of Neumayer, protested and 
threatened. To no purpose. After two days’ negotiations, the decree 
transferring Neumayer appeared in the Moniteur,? and there was 
nothing left for the hero of order but to submit to discipline or 
resign. 

Bonaparte’s struggle with Changarnier is the continuation of his 
struggle with the party of Order. The re-opening of the National 
Assembly on November 11 will, therefore, take place under threat- 
ening auspices. It will be a storm in a teacup. In essence the old 
game must go on. Meanwhile the majority of the party of Order will, 
despite the clamour of the sticklers for principle of its different 
factions, be compelled to prolong the power of the President. Sim- 
ilarly, Bonaparte, already humbled by lack of money, will, despite all 
preliminary protestations, accept this prolongation of power from 
the hands of the National Assembly as simply delegated to him. Thus 
the solution is postponed; the status quo continued; one faction of the 
party of Order compromised, weakened, made impossible by the 
other; the repression of the common enemy, the mass of the nation, 
extended and exhausted, until the economic relations themselves 
have again reached the point of development where a new explosion 
blows into the air all these squabbling parties with their constitutional 
republic. 

For the peace of mind of the bourgeois it must be said, however, 
that the scandal between Bonaparte and the party of Order has the 
result of ruining a multitude of small capitalists on the Bourse and 
putting their assets into the pockets of the big wolves of the Bourse. 

In Germany the political events of the last six months are epito- 
mised by the spectacle of Prussia duping the liberals and Austria 
duping Prussia. 

In 1849 it appeared to be Prussia’s hegemony in Germany that was 
at issue; in 1850 it was a question of the division of power between 
Austria and Prussia; in 1851 it will only be a question of the form in 
which Prussia submits to Austria and returns as a penitent sinner to 
the fold of the totally restored Federal Diet. The Little Germany 
which the King of Prussia had hoped to negotiate as compensation 
for his disastrous imperial procession through Berlin on March 21, 
1848,3% has turned into Little Prussia; Prussia has had to take every 
humiliation meekly and has vanished from the ranks of the Great 

2 Le Moniteur universel No. 303, October 30, 1850.— Ed. 

Powers. Even the modest dream of the Union has been once more 
dispelled by the usual perfidious narrow-mindedness of her policies. 
She falsely claimed a liberal character for the Union and thus duped 
the wise men of the Gotha party*” with constitutional phantas- 
magories that were never seriously meant; and yet she herself had 
become so bourgeois even by virtue of her whole industrial de- 
velopment, her permanent deficit and her national debt that for 
all her squirming and struggling her surrender to constitutionalism 
was becoming increasingly irrevocable. If the wise men of Gotha at 
length discovered how disgracefully Prussia had trampled on their 
honour and their ideas, if even men like Gagern and Bruggemann 
finally turned their backs in noble indignation on a government 
which played so contemptuously with the unity and freedom of the 
fatherland, Prussia herself found no greater joy in those little chicks 
she had gathered beneath her protecting wing, the small princes. 
The petty princes had only entrusted themselves at a moment of 
extreme distress and vulnerability to the avidly mediatising *” talons 
of the Prussian eagle; Prussian interventions, threats and demonstra- 
tions to restore their subjects to their former obedience, had cost 
them dear in the form of oppressive military agreements, expensive 
quartering of troops and the prospect of imminent mediatisation by 
the constitution of the Union. But Prussia herself had taken care that 
they would once more escape this new danger. Everywhere Prussia 
had brought the forces of reaction back to power, and the greater the 
progress of the forces of reaction, the more the petty princes 
deserted Prussia and threw themselves into the arms of Austria. Once 
they were able to rule again as they had before March, they found 
absolutist Austria more congenial than a power which was as in- 
capable of being absolutist as it was reluctant to be liberal. Further- 
more, Austrian policy did not lead to the mediatisation of the small 
states but on the contrary to their maintenance as integral parts 
of a Federal Diet which was to be restored. Prussia thus watched 
herself being deserted by Saxony, whom Prussian troops had saved 
not many months before, by Hanover, by Hesse-Cassel, and now 
Baden too, despite her Prussian garrisons, was following the others. 
That Prussia’s support for the forces of reaction in Hamburg, 
Mecklenburg, Dessau, etc., etc., was not to her advantage but to 
Austria’s, she can now clearly see from the events in the two 
Hesses.*”* Thus the German Emperor manqué at least learnt that his 
is an age of disloyalty, and if he now has to tolerate the amputation of 
“his right arm, the Union”, this arm had already been withered for 
some considerable time. Thus Austria has now already brought the 
whole of South Germany under her hegemony, and in North 

Review 527 

Germany too the most important states are Prussia’s oppo- 
nents. 

Austria had now advanced sufficiently to be able with Russia’s 
support to challenge Prussia openly. She did so over two issues: | 
Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse-Cassel. 

In Schleswig-Holstein the “sword of Germany” had concluded a 
genuinely Prussian separate peace and delivered its allies into the 
hands of a more powerful enemy. Great Britain, Russia and France 
determined to put an end to the independence of the duchies and 
expressed this intention in a protocol, to which Austria also sub- 
scribed.*”? Whilst Austria and the German governments allied to 
her advocated Federal intervention in Holstein in Denmark’s favour 
at the restored Federal Diet, in accordance with the London 
protocol,** Prussia sought to continue her double-dealing policy and 
to persuade the parties to submit to a Federal Arbitration Court 
which was as yet completely non-existent, indefinable and rejected 
by most of the governments, including the most important, and with 
all her manoeuvres managed only to incur the suspicion of the Great 
Powers that she was indulging in revolutionary intrigues and to be 
sent a series of threatening notes which will soon spoil her taste for 
an “independent” foreign policy. The people of Schleswig-Holstein 
will shortly get their lord and master back, and a people that allows 
itself to be governed by Messrs. Beseler and Reventlow, despite the 
fact that it has the whole army on its side, shows that it still needs the 
strictness of Danish tutelage for its education. 

The movement in Hesse-Cassel provides us with a unique example 
of what a “rising” in a small German state can achieve. The virtuous 
burgher opposition to the fraud Hassenpflug had accomplished 
all that could be expected of such a display: the Chamber was 
unanimous, the country was unanimous, the civil service and the 
army were on the side of the citizenry, all recalcitrant elements had 
been removed, “Out with the Princes” had been realised of its own 
accord, the fraud Hassenpflug had disappeared with his whole 
ministry; everything went without a hitch, all the parties kept strictly 
within the bounds of the law, all excesses were avoided, and without. 
lifting a finger the opposition had carried off the most splendid 
victory recorded in the annals of constitutional opposition. And 
now, when the burghers had all power in their hands, when their 
burghers’ committee was encountering not the slightest resistance 
anywhere, only now were they really needed. Now they saw that 
instead of the Electoral troops, foreign troops were at the frontier, 
ready to move in and put an end within twenty-four hours to all this 
burgher glory. Only now did indecision and humiliation commence; 

if they had previously been unable to retreat, now they were unable 
to advance. The tax refusal in Hesse-Cassel demonstrates more 
forcibly than any previous event that all conflicts within the small 
states terminate as pure farce, their only outcome in the end being 
foreign intervention and the elimination of the conflict by the 
elimination of both the ruling prince and the constitution. It 
demonstrates how absurd all those highly important battles are in 
which the petty bourgeoisie of the small states seek with patriotic 
loyalty to their ideals to save every little achievement of March from 
its inevitable ruin. 

In Hesse-Cassel, a state which belonged to the Union and which 
was to be snatched from the Prussian embrace, Austria chal- 
lenged her rival directly. It was Austria which positively incited the 
Elector* to attack the constitution and then immediately placed 
him under the protection of her Federal Diet. With the intention 
of giving this protection greater force, using the Hesse-Cassel 
affair to break Prussia’s opposition to Austrian hegemony and black- 
mailing Prussia back into the Federal Diet, Austrian and South 
German troops were now mobilised in Franconia and Bohemia. 
Prussia is likewise arming. The newspapers are overflowing with 
reports of marches and countermarches of the army corps. None of 
this noise will lead to anything, any more than does the bickering of 
the French party of Order with Bonaparte. Neither the King of 
Prussia nor the Emperor of Austria is sovereign, but the Russian 
Tsar> alone. At his command rebellious Prussia will eventually 
submit without a dropof blood being shed and the parties will come 
together peaceably on the benches of the Federal Diet, without there 
being the slightest diminution in their petty mutual jealousies, nor in 
their dissensions with their subjects, nor in their irritation at Russian 
supremacy. 

We now come to the land as such, to the people of Europe, to the 
émigré people. We shall say nothing of the individual groups of 
émigrés, the German, French, Hungarian, etc.; their haute politique 
amounts to no more than pure chronique scandaleuse. But the 
European people as a whole in partibus infidelium have recently 
acquired a provisional government in the shape of the European 
Central Committee, consisting of Giuseppe Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, 
Albert Darasz (a Pole) and—Arnold Ruge, who, to justify his 
existence, modestly puts after his name: Member of the Frankfurt 

4 Frederick William I.— Ed. 
> Frederick William IV, Francis Joseph I, Nicholas 1.— Ed. 

Review 529 

National Assembly.**’ Though there is no saying what democratic 
council summoned these four evangelists to their office, it still cannot 
be denied that their manifesto represents the credo of the great mass 
of émigrés and provides a fitting summary of the intellectual 
achievements which this mass owes to the recent revolutions.’ 

The manifesto begins with a resounding enumeration of the 
strengths of democracy. 

“What does democracy lack for victory? ... organisation .... We have sects but no 
Church, incomplete and contradictory philosophies, but no religion, no collective faith 
which rallies the faithful beneath a single banner and harmonises their labour.... The 
day on which we find ourselves all united, marching together beneath the gaze of the 
best of us ... will be the eve of the struggle. On that day we shall have counted our 
number, we shall know who we are, we shall have the consciousness of our strength.” 

Why has the revolution failed so far? Because the organisation of 
revolutionary power was weaker. That is the first decree of the 
provisional émigré government. 

This deficiency is now to be remedied by the organisation of an 
army of faith and the foundation of a religion. 

“But, for this, two great obstacles must be overcome, two great errors eradicated: 
exaggeration of the rights of individuality, and petty exclusivity in matters of theory.... 
We must not say: I;.we must learn to say: we; ... Those who, following their individual 
susceptibilities, refuse the small sacrifice which organisation and discipline require, 
are denying, on account of the habits of the past, the all-embracing faith they preach... 
exclusivity in point of theory is the negation of our basic dogma. Whoever says: I have 
found the political truth, and whoever makes acceptance of his system a condition of 
acceptance of fraternal association, is denying the people, the only progressive 
interpreter of the world-law, solely in order to assert his own self. Whoever claims in 
these days to have discovered by the isolated application of his intellect, however 
powerful it may be, the ultimate solution to the problems which agitate the masses, is 
condemning himself to error by incompleteness, because he is leaving untapped one 
of the eternal springs of truth, the collective intuition of the people immersed in 
action. The ultimate solution is the secret of victory.... Our systems can for the most 
part be no more than the dissection of corpses, a discovery of evil, an analysis of death, 
powerless to apprehend or comprehend life. Life is the people in motion, it is the 
instinct of the masses, raised to an uncommon power by mutual contact, by the 
prophetic feeling of great things which are to be accomplished, by involuntary, 
sudden, electric association in the streets; it is action, exciting to the highest point all 
capacities for hope, self-sacrifice, love and enthusiasm which are now dormant and 
which reveal man in the unity of his nature, in the full power of his procreative 
potential. The hand-clasp of a worker in one of these historic moments which 
inaugurate an epoch will teach us more about the organisation of the future than 
could be taught today by the cold and unfeeling travail of the intellect or knowledge of 
the dead magnificence of the last two millennia—the old society.” 

* “Aux Peuples! Organisation de la démocratie”, July 22, 1850, Le Proscrit No. 2, 
August 6, 1850.— Ed. 

All this pompous nonsense thus amounts in the end to the most 
ordinary philistine view that the revolution failed because of the 
ambition and jealousy of the individual leaders and the mutually 
hostile views of the various popular educators. 

The struggles of the various classes and factions of the classes 
against each other, whose progress through their individual stages of 
development actually constitutes the revolution, are in the view of 
our evangelists only the unfortunate consequences of the existence 
of divergent systems, whilst in reality the reverse is true, the 
existence of various systems is the consequence of the existence of 
the class struggles. This itself shows that the authors of the manifesto 
deny the existence of the class struggles. Under the pretext of 
_ combating dogmatists, they do away with all specific content, every 
specific party point of view, and forbid the individual classes to 
formulate their interests and demands vis-a-vis the other classes. 
They expect them to forget their conflicting interests and to become 
reconciled under the flag of a vagueness as shallow as it is unblushing 
which only conceals beneath the apparent reconciliation of all party 
interests the domination of the interest of one party—the bourgeois 
party. After the experiences which these gentlemen must have ac- 
quired in France, Germany and Italy in the last two years, one can- 
not even say that the hypocrisy with which the bourgeois interest is 
here wrapped up in Lamartinesque clichés of fraternity is uncon- 
scious. The extent of these gentlemen’s acquaintance with the 
“systems” incidentally emerges even from the fact that they imagine 
each of these systems is merely a fragment of the wisdom put 
together in the manifesto and has one-sidedly taken as its basis just a 
single one of the clichés liberty, equality, etc., which are here 
collected. Their ideas of social organisations are most strikingly 
expressed: a mass gathering in the streets, a riot, a hand-clasp, and 
it’s all over. In their view indeed revolution consists merely in the 
overthrow of the existing government; once this aim has been 
achieved “ithe victory” has been won. Movement, development and 
struggle then cease, and under the aegis of the European Central 
Committee that would then be in control, there begins the gold- 
en age of the European republic and somnolence proclaimed 
for evermore. These gentlemen also abhor thinking, unfeeling 
thinking, just as they do development and struggle —as though any 
thinker, Hegel and Ricardo not excepted, had ever attained the 
degree of unfeelingness with which this sentimental drivel is poured 
over the heads of the public! The people shall have no thought for 
the morrow and must strike all ideas from its mind; come the great 
day of decision, and it will be electrified by mere contact, and the 

Review 531 

riddle of the future will be solved by‘a miracle. This appeal to 
mindlessness is a direct attempt at duping precisely the most op- 
pressed classes of the people. 

“Are we thereby saying” (asks one member of the European Central Committee of 
another) “that we should march onward without a flag, are we saying that we intend to 
inscribe a mere negation on our banner? No such suspicion can fall on us. Being men 
of the people, long involved in its struggles, we have no intention of leading it into 
vacancy.” 

In order to demonstrate on the contrary their plenitude, these 
gentlemen parade before us a positively Leporellian register of 
eternal truth and the achievements of the whole of past history as the 
present common ground of “democracy”. This register is summa- 
rised in the following edifying paternoster: 

‘We believe in the progressive development of human ability and powers towards 
the moral law which has been imposed on us. We believe in association as the only 
regular means which can attain this end. We believe that the interpretation of the 
moral law and of the rule of progress can be entrusted neither to a caste nor to an 
individual, but to the people, enlightened by national education and led by those from 
its midst whom virtue and genius show to it to be the best. We believe in the sanctity of 
both individuality and society, which may neither exclude nor conflict with each other, 
but harmonise for the betterment of all by all. We believe in liberty, without which 
there can be no human responsibility, in equality, without which liberty is only a sham, : 
in fraternity, without which liberty and equality would be means without an end, in 
association, without which fraternity would only be an unrealisable programme, in 
family, community and state and fatherland as being a progression of as many spheres in 
which man must successively grow up in the recognition and practice of liberty, 
equality, fraternity and association. We believe in the sanctity of labour, in property 
which arises from it as its mark and fruit, in the duty of society to provide the element 
of material labour through credit and of intellectual and moral labour through 
education.... To sum up, we believe in a social condition which has God and His law as its 
highest point and the people as its base....”* 

Thus: progress—association—moral law—liberty—equality— 
fraternity—association—family, community, state—sanctity of 
property —credit—education—God and the people— Dio e Popolo. 
These clichés figure in all the manifestos of the 1848 revolutions, 
from the French to the Wallachian, and for that very reason they 
figure here too [as] the common foundations of the new revolution. 
Nor did any of these revolutions dispense with the sanctity of 
property, which is here sanctified as the result of labour. To just 
what an extent all bourgeois property is “the fruit and mark of 
labour” Adam Smith already knew far better than our revolutionary 
initiators eighty years after him. Concerning the socialist concession 

* The italics in this excerpt are by the authors of the “Review” .— Ed. 

that society shall through credit provide everyone with the material 
for his work, every manufacturer is accustomed to giving his worker 
credit for as much material as he can make up in one week, the credit 
system is as widespread nowadays as is compatible with the invio- 
lability of property, and finally credit itself is only a form of bour- 
geois property. . 

The gist of this gospel is a social condition in which God represents 
the highest point and the people, or, as it is put later, humanity, the 
base. In other words, they believe in present society, in which as we 
all know God represents the highest point and the mob the base. If 
Mazzini’s motto, God and the people, Dio e Popolo, may have 
meaning in Italy, where God is set against the Pope and the people 
against the princes, it is going rather far to present this plagiarism 
by Johannes Ronge, the shallowest scum of the German so-called 
enlightenment, as the dictum which is to solve the riddle of the 
century. Just how easily.one becomes accustomed in this school of 
thinking, incidentally, to the little sacrifices which organisation and 
discipline require, just how obligingly one gives up petty exclusivity 
in matters of theory, is demonstrated by our Arnold Winkelried 
Ruge, who on this occasion, to Leo’s great delight, is prepared to pay 
proper tribute to the distinction between divinity and humanity.*” 

The manifesto ends with the words: 

“Tt is a question of the constitution of European democracy, the establishment of a 
budget, a treasury of the people. It is a question of the organisation of the army of 
initiators.” 

Ruge, setting out to be the first initiator of this people’s budget, 
has turned to “de demokratische Jantjes* van Amsterdam” and 
explained to them their special vocation for paying out money. 
Holland beware! 

London, November 1, 1850