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Workingmen and Workingwomen:

HE "Communist Manifesto" was now to be considered the theoretical basis upon which all future activity of the League's members had to rest: all subsequent propaganda, acts and the tactics flowing therefrom were to be evolved in accord or along the lines with the axiomatic principles and aims promulgated in this historic document. However, historic conditions soon compelled the various national groups and members to somewhat loosen their connections with the League, which gave rise to a condition of affairs that bordered upon dissolution of the young organization. Through the compelling force of social events, events which finally culminated into the various revolutionary uprisings of 1848, the workers were forced to unite with the bourgeoisie in their respective countries, and battle unitedly for constitutional government and civil liberties. This struggle of the proletariat and capitalist class against feudal prerogatives gave Marx and his followers the opportunity to propagate their principles in the open: to present for the first time in history the workers' position in this revolutionary drama before the public.

The February revolution in Paris, a revolution that deposed Louis Phillipe, the citizen-king, was the signal for a general uprising against despotism in Europe. This insurrection of the industrial capitalists of Paris against the government of the large agrarian interests (bourgeois as well as feudal) was the summons of social evolution to adapt the obsolete political organs in capitalist society to the changed economic conditions: conditions which were retarded in their growth and development by the antiquated, reactionary and abnormal character of the existing political institutions. In Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy the