October 4 to November 12, 1852, the following were sentenced 
for attempted high treason: Roser, Burgers and Nothjung to six, 
Reiff, Otto and Becker to five and Lessner to three years’ 
confinement in a fortress; Daniels, Klein, Jacobi and Erhard were 
acquitted. 

With the Cologne trial this first period of the German 
communist workers’ movement comes to an end. Immediately 
after the sentence we dissolved our League; a few months later the 
Willich-Schapper Sonderbund” was also laid to eternal rest. 

A whole generation lies between then and now. At that time 
Germany was a country of handicraft and of domestic industry 
based on manual labour; now it is a big industrial country still 
undergoing continual industrial transformation. At that time one 
had to seek out one by one the workers who had an understand- 
ing of their position as workers and of their historico-economic 
antagonism to capital, because this antagonism was itself in the 
process of taking shape. Today the entire German proletariat has 
to be placed under exceptional laws,7°6 merely in order to slow 
down a little the process of its development to full consciousness 
of its position as an oppressed class. At that time the few persons 
who reached an understanding of the historical role of the 
proletariat had to gather in secret, to assemble clandestinely in 
small communities of 3 to 20 persons. Today the German 
proletariat no longer needs any official organisation, either public 
or secret. The simple self-evident interconnection of like-minded 
class comrades suffices, without any rules, authorities, resolutions 
or other tangible forms, to shake the whole German Empire. 
Bismarck is the arbiter of Europe beyond the frontiers of 
Germany, but within them there grows daily more threateningly 

the athletic figure of the German proletariat that Marx foresaw 
back in 1844, the giant for whom the cramped imperial edifice 
designed to fit the philistine is already becoming too small and 
whose mighty stature and broad shoulders grow until the moment 
comes when by merely rising from his seat he will blast the whole 
structure of the imperial constitution to rubble. And still more. 
The international movement of the European and American 
proletariat has so grown in strength that not only its first narrow 
form—the secret League—but even its second, infinitely broader 
form—the open International Working Men’s Association—has 
become a fetter for it, and that the simple feeling of solidarity 
based on the understanding of the identity of class position 
suffices to create and to hold together one and the same great 
party of the proletariat among the workers of all countries and 
tongues. The doctrine which the League represented from 1847 to 
1852, and which at that time was treated by the wise philistines 
with a shrug of the shoulders as the hallucinations of utter 
madcaps, as the secret doctrine of a few scattered sectarians, has 
now innumerable adherents in all civilised countries of the world, 
among those condemned to the Siberan mines as much as among 
the gold diggers of California; and the founder of this doctrine, 
the most hated, most slandered man of his time, Karl Marx, was 
when he died, the ever-sought-after and ever-willing counsellor of 
the proletariat of the old and the new world. 

London, October 8, 1885 

Frederick Engels