Page:Karl Marx The Man and His Work.pdf/47

Rh ment expel or try these undesirable residents for a breach of the law or some other valid reason? No, the imperial government was paying its debt of 1849 to the "little father"; the imperial government saw in Russian autocracy a citadel of absolutism and a bulwark, not only against political Democracy, but also against the rising tide of Socialism—the spectre of which was truly haunting Europe and particularly Germany. With fiendish glee Junkerdom and its awe-stricken capitalist lackeys surrendered thousands of Russian fugitives, who had deemed themselves safely out of the reach of the bloody monster, to the executioners of the Czar. And this identical government has today the brazen audacity to bewail and indict erstwhile Russian barbarism, calling itself a pillar of culture.

In Paris, Marx and Engels organized a communist club of German workingmen. Herwegh, the genial poet, was at that time attempting to form a battallion of German republicans for the purpose of invading Germany. Marx very emphatically discouraged this adventurous and highly spectacular and purely sentimental movement, and advised the workers to return to Germany individually and unobserved, and to there begin a revolutionary agitation amongst their fellow-workers.

In April we find Marx in Cologne, one of the most important centers of events and the heart of the highly developed and industrialized Rhine district. He had preferred Cologne to Berlin, because the Code Napoleon, a legacy of the Napoleonic era and the French Revolution, insured to him a greater field of activity and more unmolested movement. At least here political trials were not brought before professional judges of the feudal-bureaucratic state, but tried by a jury. As stated before, in the Rhineland the capitalist mode of production had revolutionized conditions more thoroughly than either in the East of Prussia or the southern part of Germany, consequently, the capitalist class was here more progressive and democratic, and more inclined to a vigorous struggle for a constitutional government. The prole-