The Crisis and the Counter-Revolution

[Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 100, September 12, 1848]

Cologne, September 11. Let people read our following Berlin correspondence and say whether we did not quite correctly predict the development of the ministerial crisis. The old ministers are resigning; the plan of the ministry to maintain itself through the dissolution of the Assembly of Agreement, through martial law and cannons, seems not to have found the approval of the camarilla. The Uckermark Junkerdom is burning with desire for a conflict with the people, for a repetition of the Paris June scenes in the streets of Berlin; but they will never fight for the Hansemann ministry, they will fight for the ministry of the Prince of Prussia. Radowitz, Vincke and similar reliable people, who are strangers to the Berlin Assembly, who are unfettered in regard to it, are being summoned; the cream of the Prussian and Westphalian knighthood, seemingly associated with a few bourgeois philistines of the extreme Right, with a Beckerath and consorts, to whom the prosaic commercial affairs of the state are transferred—that is the ministry of the Prince of Prussia with which they think to bless us. Meanwhile, hundreds of rumours are being spread, perhaps Waldeck or Rodbertus is being summoned, public opinion is being led astray, military preparations are being made in the meantime, and they will come out openly when the time comes.

We are heading for a decisive struggle. The simultaneous crises in Frankfurt and Berlin, the latest resolutions of the two assemblies, compel the counter-revolution to deliver its last battle. If they dare in Berlin to trample underfoot the constitutional principle of the rule of the majority, if they oppose the 219 votes of the majority with double the number of cannons, if they dare to deride the majority not only in Berlin, but also in Frankfurt through a ministry that.