XV
In the meantime the secret finance committee of the "émigrés" had elected a managing committee consisting of Kinkel, Willich and Reichenbach and it now resolved to take serious measures in connection with the German loan. As reported in the New York
Schnellpost, the New-Yorker Deutsche Zeitung and the Baltimore Correspondent at the end of 1851, student Schurz was sent on a mission to France, Belgium and Switzerland where he sought out all old, forgotten, and vanished parliamentarians, imperial regents,[214] deputies of Chambers and other noteworthy men, right down to the late Raveaux, to get them to guarantee the loan. The forgotten unfortunates hastened to give their guarantee. For what else was the guarantee of the loan if not a mutual guarantee of government posts in partibus*; and Messrs. Kinkel, Willich and Reichenbach likewise obtained by this means guarantees of their future prospects. And these worried worthies in Switzerland were so obsessed with "organisation" and the guarantee of future posts that they had long before worked out a plan by which government posts would be awarded according to seniority—which produced a terrible scandal about who were to have Nos. 1, 2 and 3. In short, student Schurz brought back the guarantee in his pocket and so they all went to work. Some days earlier Kinkel had, it is true, promised in another meeting with the "agitators" that he would not go ahead with ah "Emigration" loan without them. For that very reason he departed taking the signatures of the guarantors and carte blanche from Reichenbach and Willich—ostensibly to find customers for his aesthetic lectures in the north of England, but in reality to go to Liverpool and embark for New York where he hoped like Perceval to find the Holy Grail, the gold of the democratic parties.
And now begins that sweet-sounding, strange, magniloquent, fabulous, true and adventurous story of the great battles fought on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean between the Émigrés and the Agitators. It was a war waged with renewed bitterness and with indefatigable persistence. In it we witness Gottfried's crusade in the course of which he contends with Kossuth and after great labours and indescribable temptations he finally returns home with the Grail in the bag.
Or, bei signori, io vi lascio al présente,
E se voi tornerete in questo loco,
Dirô questa battaglia dov'io lasso
Ch'un altra non fu mai di tal fracasso.
(Boiardo, Canto 26)
And there, kind Sirs, I leave you for the present, If one day you return unto this place I'll give you further news of this great war So full of mighty deeds ne'er done before.
VOL. Xll NO. 3.540. NEW-YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 81, 1852. PRICE TWO CENIx
Endnotes
[214] 1851"). In March 1851 Marx and Engels translated it into German and English and provided it with an introduction (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 537-39). The German translation was published in 30,000 copies and was circulated in Germany and Austria.