The Trial of the Tax Refusal

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung"
No. 218, February 10, 1849]
* Cologne, February 9. If the verdict of the jury in our press trial the day before yesterday was of importance for the press, yesterday’s acquittal of Marx, Schneider and Schapper is decisive for all the trials pending before Rhenish courts in connection with the tax refusal. The fact itself was quite simple and not subject to any doubt. The incriminating document read:

“The Rhenish District Committee of the Democrats calls upon all democratic associations in the Rhine Province to have the following measures resolved and carried out:

1. After the Prussian National Assembly itself has resolved the refusal of taxes, the forcible collection of taxes is everywhere to be resisted by every kind of opposition.

2. The Landsturm for defence against the enemy is everywhere to be organised...

3. The authorities are everywhere to be called upon to declare publicly whether they recognise and will carry out the resolutions of the National Assembly. In the event of refusal, committees of public safety are to be appointed. Communal councils that oppose the legislative assembly are to be replaced by general popular elections.”

This document is surely clear enough. Apart from the question of the validity or invalidity of the tax refusal resolution, this was clearly a case of incitement to insurrection and civil war. The accused also made no secret of the fact that by the “enemy” (in paragraph 2) was to be understood the internal enemy, the armed force of the government.

Nevertheless, the public prosecutor, despairing of a conviction under this article of the Code, had chosen the milder charge: incitement to rebellion and to resistance against the agents of state authority (Art. 209 et seq.).

From that point onward, the only question at issue was the political one: whether the persons entitled were authorised by the Assembly’s tax refusal resolution to call in this manner for resistance to the state authority, to organise an armed force against that of the state, and to have authorities dismissed and appointed on their own authority.

The jury answered this question in the affirmative after very brief deliberation.

Following this verdict, Lassalle and Cantador, too, will probably soon be set at liberty. It is not to be expected that the Indictment Chamber of Cologne will hold a different opinion regarding them than the jury did regarding Marx, Schneider and Schapper.

We shall, by the way, return specifically to Lassalle tomorrow. There seems to be the well-meaning intention to drag his case out beyond the next assizes (in March) and thus to impose on him another three months’ detention on remand. It is to be hoped, however, that the pronouncement of the Cologne jury will thwart such humanitarian plans. How Lassalle is being treated in Düsseldorf prison – some pleasant details on this tomorrow.