Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/21

 the great popular masses were so easily won over by the merely plausible lures of the forward-pushing minorities, why should they be less accessible to ideas that were the very reflex of their economic condition, nothing but the clear, logical expression of their needs not yet understood and only vaguely sensed by them? True, this revolutionary disposition of the masses had most always, and often very soon, made way for lassitude or even a reversal into its opposite as soon as the illusion had been dispelled and disenchantment had come. But here was not a case of lures but one of the attainment of the very interests of the great majority itself, interests then by no means clear to that majority, but which soon had to become clear through convincing demonstrations in the course of their realization. And if then, as shown in the third article of Marx, in the spring of 1850 developments had concentrated the real ruling power in the bourgeois republic that had emanated from the "social" revolution of 1848 in the hands of the big bourgeoisie, which, on top of all, entertained monarchistic desires, while all other social classes, peasants as well as petty bourgeoisie, had been grouped about the proletariat in such manner that in case and after a common victory not the bourgeoisie but the proletariat made wary by experience would become the decisive factor—in such case were not the chances favorable for a reversion of the revolution of the minority into the revolution of the majority?

History has proved us wrong and all others who