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 superficial 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 crisis[3] [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 b 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 laterC5V2 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. In a copy of the "Review" containing Engels' corrections the word später (later) is replaced by über (over).— Ed.
South Sea Company.[349] 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 continuously 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 reached their peak in May 1847. In that month the average price of a quarter of wheat in Great Britain rose to IO2V2 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 49Vz 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 continuation 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 disrupted. 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 £172 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[3] had fallen to £2(1)/z 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,[15] 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 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 companies 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 businesses 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 5lA? 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.[3] 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.[350] 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,[6] would inevitably have failed, whilst the Issue Department(2) 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, Amsterdam, 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),(3) 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 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.(4) 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 £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.
"It 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 conveniendy 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% 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 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 constandy 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[3] 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,[351] 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(5) are constantly planning anew for the salvation of the world. This exhibition is a striking demonstration 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 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.(6)) 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.[352] 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.
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.(7) 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 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 landowners 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 significantly 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 revolutions 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 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 controla 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 Revueh 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 market 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 exchanging 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,c and compared with the sudden development of Asian and Australian traffic with 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[3] and that across the Isthmus of Tehuantepee, 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 communications 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 95Va 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 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 steamships 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 services; 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[3] 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 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 repercussions 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 extremely satisfactory to those members of the bourgeoisie who have a stake in them. Not for an instant were the disturbances in Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse-Cassel, the disputes concerning the union and the threatening notes sent by Austria and Prussia[353] able to hold up the development of all these symptoms of prosperity, as The Economist indeed observed[3] in its supercilious cockneyb 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 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[3] 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.
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.[354] He did not even need to know the history of the restriction on the English bank from 1797-1819[355]; 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 later 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 factors, 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 is, 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 incarnation 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[3]
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.
the Russian loan and could not find sarcasms enough to heap on the great pauper (8) of Petersburg; six months later he descended to the scandalous farce of the Peace Congress,[356] whose only outcome was that an Ojibway Indian(9) 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 à serious turn as long as Herr von Gagern is involved in it and Venedey is not!
In fact the great political issue of the past session was the Greek debate.[357] 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(10) 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.[358]
If in his display against Greece and in his speech in Parliament Palmerston adopted a bourgeois-liberal stand vis-à-vis the reactionaries of Europe, the British people used the presence of Herr Haynau in London for a striking display of their foreign pol-
[359] icy.
If 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 JBims^nfrom 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.
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.[360] 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.[3]
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.(11) 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 found at the two extremes of society, the aristocracy and the lumpenproletariat. The lumpenproletariat, the riff-raff of Irish origin or descended from Irishmen, is Catholic by descent. The aristocracy has for so long, indulged in the fashionable flirtation with Puseyism [361] 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 aristocracy to display its feudal character, the struggle against the theologians of the bourgeois dissenting religion[362] was of course increasingly 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[3]
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 dairyings, are starting back in horror, and the Puseyite bishop of London(12) has at once issued a declaration in which he recants all his errors and declares a war to the death on the papacy.(13)—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 (14) 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 emigres on him.(15) The Globe, Palmerston's paper, drew an extremely witty parallel between the Papal Bull and Mazzini's latest manifesto.[3] The Pope, it said, lays claim to spiritual supremacy over Great Britain and is appointing bishops in partions 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 addressing — 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 Committee, he has in fact now announced from London the 10 million fr. loan, approved by the Constituent Assembly in Rome,[363] 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 unsuccessful voluntary loan in Lombardy.[364]
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 bourgeois 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 himself countless contradictions which are resolved and harmonised in the form of a certain banal common sense(16) 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 movement; 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.[365] 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 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 Eugène 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,[366] 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 proposal on its own responsibility. It made an apparent concession to the majority by entrusting the drafting of the bill to the high dignitaries of this majority, to the seventeen burgraves.[367] 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.
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 revolutionary 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, however, 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.[368] 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(17) 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 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.[3] 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 remained 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 Eugène 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 extended 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. Every 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 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[3] 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 Philippe'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.b
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.'"0
This comedy of the républicains malgré eux,d the antipathy to the status quo and the constant consolidation of it; the incessant friction 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[369]—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 grâce* 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 National Assembly and sentenced to pay the highest fine, 5,000 francs.[3] 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 concerif 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 President. 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.[370] In their stead, even some republicans of the Siècle 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 dispossessed; the Count of Paris,b 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 consisted mostly of members of that commission of guardians of the virtue of the republic[371] 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[372] 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 Revision in the first months of the new presidency, is utterly inadmissible for the ruling class. The day of the new presidential election would be the day of rendezvous for all the hostile parties, the Legitimists, the Orleanists, the bourgeois republicans, the revolutionists. 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 people, about the other pillar in the matter of the election law. He 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 question on the first Sunday in May 1852,[3 3] 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 postponement 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 indispensable 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,[374]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 buv 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 [Wwrst], 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 himself 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 magnifying the figure of Changarnier. With the complete absence of great personalities, the party of Order naturally found itself compelled 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 Changarnier 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,(18) 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 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 threatening 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. Similarly, 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,[375] has turned into Little Prussia; Prussia has had to take every humiliation meekly and has vanished from the ranks of the Great 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[376] with constitutional phantas-magories that were never seriously meant; and yet she herself had become so bourgeois even by virtue of her whole industrial development, 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 Brüggemann 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[377] 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 médiatisation 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 incapable of being absolutist as it was reluctant to be liberal. Furthermore, Austrian policy did not lead to the médiatisation 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.[378] Thus the German Emperor manque 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 Germany too the most important states are Prussia's opponents.
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.[379] 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,[380] 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 challenged her rival directly. It was Austria which positively incited the Elector(19) 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(20) alone. At his command rebellious Prussia will eventually submit without a drop of 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 National Assembly.[381] 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.[3]
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."
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-à-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 acquired in France, Germany and Italy in the last two years, one cannot even say that the hypocrisy with which the bourgeois interest is here wrapped up in Lamartinesque clichés of fraternity is unconscious. 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 "the 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 golden 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 riddle of the future will be solved by a miracle. This appeal to mindlessness is a direct attempt at duping precisely the most oppressed 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 gendemen 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 summarised 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...."(21)
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 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 inviolability of property, and finally credit itself is only a form of bourgeois 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 Rüge, who on this occasion, to Leo's great delight, is prepared to pay proper tribute to the distinction between divinity and humanity.[382]
The manifesto ends with the words:
"It 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(22) van Amsterdam" and explained to them their special vocation for paying out money. Holland beware!
London, November 1, 1850
1850 Published in English in full for the first time
Endnotes
[348] This, third, international review, just like the first and the second published in the previous issues of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue, is a joint work by Marx and Engels (see Note 194), a fact corroborated by Marx's letter to Engels, dated October 20, 1857. Yet, when passages from this review were published during their lifetime, the only author mentioned was Marx. Marx, apparently, wrote the bulk of the text, particularly sections dealing with the economic situation in European countries, and also an analysis of the events in France which Engels later incorporated in the work The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. In September and October 1850 Marx took extracts from David Morier Evans' The Commercial Crisis 1847-1848, London, 1848, and Thomas Tooke's A History of Prices, and of the State of the Circulation, from 1839 to 1847 Inclusive, London, 1848 (Vol. 4 of the five-volume history of prices), which were used for the review. The full text of the review was never published during the authors' lifetime. Part of it dealing with England, France and Germany was published in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung (Nos. 305-07, January 31, February 7 and 14, 1851) under the title "Revue der politischen Ereignisse der letzten sechs Monate" von Carl Marx. Another passage, entitled "Geschichteder Handelskrisis von 1845-47" nach Karl Marx, was reproduced in Weydemeyer's New York weekly Die Revolution Nos. 1 and 2 of January 6 and 13, 1852. In 1895, when Engels was preparing a separate edition of Marx's Class Struggles in France for publication, he added a fourth chapter which included sections of the review dealing with the economic situation and events in France (see this volume, pp. 507-10 and 516-25). Only these sections, as part of The Class Struggles, have ever been published in English. The editors of this volume have taken account of corrections made by Marx and Engels in the margin of their copies of the Revue.
[349] The reference is to the speculative machinations of the Scottish economist and financier John Law in France between 1716 and 1720; he dealt with the issue of securities and the foundation of joint-stock trading companies. The bank which he founded in 1716, and later transferred to the French Government, as well as a number of companies for trade with foreign countries, went bankrupt in 1720. The South Sea Companyv/as founded in England about 1711, officially for trade with South America and the Pacific islands, but its real purpose was speculation in state bonds. The government granted several privileges to the Company, including the right to issue paper money. The Company's large-scale speculation brought it to bankruptcy in 1720.
[15] The Orangemen—members of the Orange Society (Order), a Protestant terrorist organisation founded in Ireland in 1795 and employed by the authorities, Protestant landlords and the clergy against the Irish national liberation movement. The name was derived from William III, Prince of Orange, who suppressed the Irish uprising of 1689-91 for restoration of the Stuart monarchy. The Order had an especially strong influence in Ulster, Northern Ireland, with a mainly Protestant population.
[350] An Act to Regulate the Issue of Bank Notes, and for Giving to the Governor and Company of the Bank of England Certain Privileges for a Limited Period was introduced by Robert Peel on July 19, 1844. It envisaged the division of the Bank of England into two completely independent departments, each with its own cash account — the Banking Department which performed purely credit operations and the Issue Department which issued bank-notes. The Act established the maximum quantity of bank-notes in circulation guaranteed by definite reserve funds of gold and silver not to be used for the credit operations of the Banking Department. Additional issue of bank-notes was allowed only if the precious metal reserves were increased proportionally. During the 1847 monetary crisis the Act was suspended.
[6] The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (962-1806) included, at different times, German, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and Bohemian lands, Switzerland and the Netherlands, forming a motley conglomeration of feudal kingdoms and principalities, church lands and free towns with different political structures, legal standards and customs.
[351] In mid-October 1850 the Emperor of Austria and the Kings of Bavaria and Württemberg met in Bregenz (on the shores of Lake Constance) to conclude a convention against Prussian claims to the hegemony in Germany. 24* On October 28, 1850, Warsaw was the scene of a meeting between the Russian Emperor Nicholas I, the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph and the head of the Prussian Government, Count Brandenburg, during which Nicholas I resolutely took the side of Austria in the Austro-Prussian conflict.
[352] In 1833 the English Parliament adopted an Act for the Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Colonies. A sum of £20 million was allocated to compensate slave-owners.
[353] On the events in Schleswig-Holstein see Note 291. In September 1850, a Constitutional conflict flared up in the electorate of Hesse-Cassel between the Elector Frederick William I and the Chamber of Representatives. The head of the government, Hans Hassenpflug, who advocated absolutism, dissolved the Chamber and introduced a state of siege in the country, thus evoking vehement protests from the entire population. The Elector and Hassenpflug sought assistance from Austria, disregarding the fact that Hesse-Cassel belonged to the confederation of German states headed by Prussia. Austria and Prussia contended for the right to mount a punitive expedition against the Hesse constitutional movement and their rivalry in Germany became even more acute. Austria countered Prussia's plans by proposing a revival of the German Confederation of 1815, and early in September 1850, at a conference of minor German states in Frankfurt am Main, she secured the restoration of the Confederation and its Diet, where she exercised the predominant influence. Early in November 1850 there were even clashes between Prussian and Austrian detachments on Hesse-Cassel territory. Before long, however, Nicholas I forced Prussia to make concessions, temporarily abandon her plans for hegemony in Germany and let Austria fulfil the punitive mission in Hesse-Cassel.
[354] See Note 122.
[355] See Note 123.
[356] This refers to the international congress of pacifists held in Frankfurt am Main in August 1850 and attended by such prominent figures as the American philanthropist Elihu Burritt, the leader of the English Free Traders Richard Cobden, and the former head of the liberal government in Hesse, Heinrich Jaup; representatives of the Quaker religious sect were also among the delegates.
[357] The reference is to the debate on the Anglo-Greek conflict at the June 1850 session of the English Parliament. In 1850 the British Government presented Greece with an ultimatum and sent ships to blockade Piraeus using as a pretext the burning (in Athens in 1847) of the house of the Portuguese merchant Pacifico, who was a British subject. The real object of this move, however, was to make Greece surrender several strategically important islands in the Aegean Sea. Russia and France protested and the French Government even recalled its Ambassador from London. During the debate, Lord Palmerston made a speech in the House of Commons demagogically exposing the policy of European states and presenting the Whig Government as the champion of civil rights and liberties.
[358] See Note 279.
[359] During his stay in London in 1850, Julius Haynau, the Austrian field marshal notorious for his cruel repressive measures against the participants in the revolutionary movement in Hungary and Italy, visited the Barclay, Perkins & Co. brewery, and was physically attacked and forced to flee by its indignant workers. The people of London warmly approved this news.
[360] The enumerated reforms were enacted on Peel's initiative (these included the Bank Act of 1844 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 — see Notes 350, 29). The Bill submitted in 1818 and enacted in 1819 stipulated that the Bank of England was to resume the exchange of bank-notes for gold. In 1829 the English Parliament passed an Act for Relief of His Majesty's Roman Catholic Subjects. The Catholics, the majority of whom were Irishmen, were given the right to be elected to Parliament and to occupy certain official posts, while the property qualifications for the electorate were raised fivefold. By this would-be emancipation of the Catholics, the English ruling classes sought to enlist the support of Catholic landowners and the upper Irish bourgeoisie. In 1829, Peel, the Home Secretary, secured the adoption of a law to form a special police corps in London, who were to be directly subordinate to the Home Office. The latter was granted the right to effect control over the police force throughout the country, a role previously fulfilled by the local authorities. The tariff reform of 1842 lowered customs duties on corn and other imported goods, but introduced income tax as a compensation for the treasury.
[361] Puseyism—a trend in the Anglican Church from the 1830s to the 1860s, named after one of its founders, Pusey, an Oxford University theologian. He advocated the restoration of Catholic rites and dogma in the Anglican Church. Many of the Puseyites were converted to Catholicism.
[362] T h e High Church—a group in the Anglican Church, most of whom belonged to the aristocracy; they emphasised the doctrine of apostolic succession and attached great importance to ceremony and symbols. The Low Church included members of the middle classes and the lower ranks of the clergy and laid special stress on Christian morality. Dissenters were members of Protestant religious sects and trends in England who to some extent rejected the dogmas and rituals of the official Anglican Church.
[363] The constituent assembly that proclaimed the Roman Republic was elected on January 21, 1849; the majority of its deputies were democrats — supporters of Mazzini. The assembly deprived the Pope of his secular power and introduced a number of progressive social measures. After the downfall of the Republic in July 1849, some of the deputies emigrated to England where they formed a provisional Italian National Committee under Mazzini.
[364] In the spring of 1850, the Austrian Government floated a so-called voluntary loan of 120 million lire in Lombardy and Venice. Since the population refused to subscribe voluntarily, however, it was enforced compulsorily.
[365] T ^ reference is to the Chartist Land Cooperative Society founded on the initiative of O'Connor in 1845 (later the National Land Company, that lasted till 1848). The aim of the Society was to buy plots of land with the money collected, and to lease them to worker shareholders on easy terms. Among the positive aspects of the Society were its petitions to Parliament and printed propaganda against the aristocracy's monopoly of land. (These aspects were emphasised by Engels in 1847 in his article "The Agrarian Programme of the Chartists", see present edition, Vol. 6.) However, the idea of liberating the workers from exploitation, of reducing unemployment, etc., by returning them to the land proved Utopian. The Society's activities were not successful in practice,
[366] See Note 46.
[367] See Note 125.
[368] See Note 48.
[369] See Note 127.
[370] See Note 56.
[371] See Note 129.
[372] The reference is to the so-called Wiesbaden Manifesto (see Note 130).
[33] Tuileries—the royal palace in Paris; prior to the February revolution, the residence of Louis Philippe. The Elysée-National—the residence (from December 1848) of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, President of the French Republic.
[374] See Note 132.
[375] Following the victory of the popular uprising in Berlin on March 18, 1848, the Prussian King Frederick William IV rode on horseback through the streets of the capital (on March 21), wearing a black-red-and-gold armband symbolising German unity. The same day in an appeal "To My People and the German Nation" he swore to take the cause of unifying Germany into his own hands. ? The Federal Diet—see Note 7. The Little Germany—see Note 199.
[376] See Note 187.
[377] Médiatisation—transformation of princes, formerly independent members of the Imperial German Confederation, into subjects of a bigger German sovereign. In the present case, the reference is to Prussia's attempts to subordinate smaller German princes to her hegemony.
[378] In 1849 the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt and the Hesse-Cassel electorate agreed to join the confederation of German states under the hegemony of Prussia (Prussian Union), but under pressure from Austria and Russia they withdrew in 1850 and sided with Austria.
[379] An ironical allusion to what Frederick William IV said to the delegates of the Frankfurt National Assembly when he received them on April 3, 1849. He agreed to accept the Imperial Crown offered him by the delegation provided the other sovereigns were in agreement. It was virtually a refusal to accept the Crown, which the Prussian King accompanied with the pompous statement: "If the Prussian shield or sword is needed to Germany against external or internal enemies, I shall not be found wanting, even if I am not called upon."
[380] The reference is to the Protocol signed on July 4, 1850, by the representatives of Austria, England, France, Denmark, Prussia, Russia and Sweden who met in London to discuss Schleswig-Holstein. The document supported the indivisibility of lands belonging to the Danish Crown, including the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein. Only Prussia refused to sign the Protocol, since two days previously she had concluded a separate peace treaty with Denmark in violation of her allied commitments to the Provisional Government of Schleswig-Holstein. In 1852, however, Prussia too had to give official recognition to this document,
[381] The reference is to the Central Committee of European Democracy (see Note 272).
[382] An allusion to the polemic that developed in the late 1830s between the clerical historian and journalist Heinrich Leo and the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, who is ironically referred to as Arnold Winkelried, the name of a semi-legendary hero of the Swiss liberation wars. In his pamphlet Die Hegelingen (Halle, 1838) Leo, who was a bitter opponent of the Hegelian philosophy, accused Ruge and other Young Hegelians of being atheists and, in particular, of not seeing the difference between divinity and humanity.
[3] In May 1849, when the counter-revolution was on the upsurge, the Prussian Government issued an order expelling Marx and the other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from Prussia. This measure, prepared well in advance, was applied when the main uprisings in the Rhine Province had been virtually suppressed. On his return to Cologne in April 1848, Marx applied for Prussian citizenship which he had been forced to renounce in 1845 when he was living in Belgium as an emigrant. Despite the Cologne Magistrate's favourable reply to his application, however, the Cologne royal district authorities and the Minister of the Interior refused to grant it, and Marx remained a "foreigner", who could at any moment be accused of abusing hospitality and expelled. The royal district authorities' note to this effect followed on May 11, 1849, and on May 16 Marx was given 24 hours to leave Prussia. Weerth and Dronke, who did not enjoy Prussian citizenship either, received similar orders. Legal proceedings were instituted against Engels for his part in the Elberfeld uprising. The last issue, No. 301, of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on May 19, 1849.