the signs of the new era and on the eve of their expulsion from Germany published a gloss on their gospel of 1848, a gloss to which their German disciples attached, as time went on, an ever greater reverence and authority.
In the universal prosperity of the present time [wrote Marx and Engels in 1850], when the productive forces of bourgeois society are developing as luxuriantly as is possible under bourgeois conditions, there can be no question of an effective revolution. Such a revolution is possible only in periods when the two factors of modern productive force and bourgeois productive methods are in conflict with each other.[1]
In the Karl Marx of 1850 is an almost pessimistic fatalism in sharp contrast to the romantic enthusiasm of a Ledru-Rollin, a Mazzini, or a Kossuth.
When, more than a decade later, almost synchronizing with the advent of Bismarck to power in Prussia, the workingmen's agitation was resumed, the chief legacy of reborn German Socialism from the days of 1848–1849 was a horror of violence. No more incitements to immediate revolution came from the people's apostles. The foremost leaders had, temporarily at least, turned from dangerous propaganda to scholarly exegesis. Marx published his Critique of Political Economy in 1859 and forthwith set to work on his masterpiece Das Capital; Lassalle's System of Acquired Rights appeared in 1861. In the meantime, the middle-class German liberals were rapidly substituting England for France as the model for their programme and their methods. The Fortschrittspartei, organized in June, 1861, soon comprised the bulk of Prussian liberals under the leadership of such men as Karl Twesten, Eduard Lasker, and Rudolf Virchow; and when, in the elections of November, 1861, the new party gained complete control of the House of Representatives, a most gracious springtime for the people seemed close at hand; as Bernstein has remarked, "it promised the rose without the thorns". Everything would now come off in the most approved parliamentary style. The party of progress would utilize the pending questions of military reform and the budget in order to compel the government both to accept the doctrine of ministerial responsibility and to respect the constitutional guarantees of personal liberties. Should the government oppose the lawfully-elected deputies, then the Progressive majority would hold up supplies imtil such time as the government would be disgraced and obliged to retire. But above all, no violence! Only a quiet, pacifistic, idyllic parliamentary pressure!
- ↑ "Revue von Mai bis Oktober 1850", Neue Rheinische Zeitung, V. and VI. 153 (1850). Quoted by Engels in his introduction to Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln (1885), p. 15.
