Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/35

xxviii could not be deemed a compensation, since the sources from which it was derived, even when they consisted in public franchises, were its "legitimate" property and could not be fructified but through its "enterprise, industry, abstinence"; it had countenanced foreign policies, dangerous ventures, costly expeditions, which it could not approve; it had, in short, sacrificed itself on the altar of patriotism. All to no purpose, as it now seemed. What would that decayed old bunco man ever be good for, anyhow? And while the proletariat attacks the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie attacks the Bonaparte, who vainly does his best to defend it. The Second Empire becomes a pandemonium; war to Germany is declared; ignominiously falls the imperial mountebank.

Then does the class battle reach its climax. The bourgeoisie rushes on to seize the power. The armed proletariat bars the way. The Commune is proclaimed.

The Commune is conquered; the Commune is murdered. Is its spirit dead? Read the manifesto.

The class war has only begun. Between the classes the chasm now is as wide and as deep as the infinite. Jump into it, ye compromisers!

Bleeding and prostrated, the French proletariat must be given time to recover its breath. It is the turn of Germany to struggle; Germany, no longer a dust of petty States, but a great nation, imperialized and united right in the face of that cowardly bourgeoisie that paid Bismarck five round milliards of labor-created wealth for the right to slaughter its own wage-slaves. Back to Berlin went Wilhelm the Great. He had seen the Commune expire; he found her ghost sitting on his imperial throne.

For nineteen years the merciless conflict raged night