Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/498

 So, for instance, it is absolutely false that in France the Republic was overthrown by the coup d'état of December, 1851.

What could not maintain itself in France, what really was destroyed at that time, was not the Republic but that republic, which, as I have already shown you, abolished, by the law of May 30, 1850, the universal franchise, and introduced a disguised property qualification for the exclusion of the workingman. It was the capitalist republic which wished to put the stamp of the bourgeoisie—the domination of capital—upon the republican forms of the State: it was this which gave the French usurper the possibility, under an apparent restoration of the universal franchise, to overthrow the Republic, which otherwise would have found an invincible bulwark in the breast of the French workingman. So what in France could not maintain itself, and was overthrown, was not the Republic, but the bourgeois republic; and, on really correct consideration, the fact is confirmed, even by this example, that the historical period which began with February, 1848, will no longer tolerate any State which, whether in monarchical or in republican form, tries to impress upon it, or maintain within it, the controlling political stamp of the third class of society.

From the lofty mountain tops of science the dawn of a new day is seen earlier than below in the turmoil of daily life.

Have you ever beheld a sunrise from the top of a high mountain? A purple line colors blood-red the farthest horizon, announcing the new light. Clouds and mists collect and oppose the morning red, veiling its beams for a moment; but no power on earth can prevail against the slow and majestic rising of the sun which, an hour later, visible to all the world, radiating light and warmth, stands bright in the firmament. What an hour is, in the natural phenomena of every day, a decade or two is in the still more impressive spectacle of a sunrise in the world's history.