Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/12

 in 1843. Moll demanded admittance to the League in the name of his comrades, under the condition that they were ready to drop the conspiratory character of the League and accept the new theoretical standpoint. Both Marx and Engels responded to the call. In the summer of 1847 the first Congress of the League met in London, to which Engels came as a representative of the members in Paris. The league received at this Congress not only a new name—the Communist League—but also an entirely new organization. From a secret association it became a society for open propaganda.

The second Congress took place at the end of November and the beginning of December of the same year. Not only Engels but Marx as well took part in this. The change which the first Congress began was completed; the last opposition and doubt removed, the new foundation unanimously adopted, and Marx and Engels were appointed to draw up the manifesto of the League.

With this there began a new epoch in the lives of Marx and Engels. They hurried at once to Paris and from there to Germany, and undertook at Cologne the management of a daily paper—the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung."

This history of Engels at this time is bound up in that of the above-named paper. To relate their history, however, would mean to give the history of the year 1848 and its accompanying events. Necessarily we cannot enter into this. Suffice to say, at no other period of their lives have Marx and Engels given a better example of the characteristics previously referred to than at that time: the intimate union of practical and theoretical work, the combination of the scholar and the statesman, of the fighter and the critic. In the revolutionary struggle no one took a more decided part than they, and no one in that fight kept themselves freer from illusions.

Never, perhaps, was a movement so full of illusions as that of 1848. This was especially true of the economically and politically immature Germany, to which naturally German-Austria belonged. The revolutionary portion of the bourgeoisie—the small land-owners and the laborers—believed that with the destruction of the reactionary government heaven would come upon earth. They had no idea that this overthrow was merely the beginning and not the end of the revolutionary struggle; that the civil freedom gained by this struggle formed the foundation upon which the great class-struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat must be fought