Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/426

 people similarly situated, and the refugees therefore divided into parties which at times antagonized one another with considerable bitterness.

When Kinkel arrived in London he occupied, naturally, a very prominent position among the refugees and became, so to speak, the head of a large following. But he also had his opponents who would recognize in him only a poet, a learned man and a political dreamer, but not a “practical revolutionist” fit to be a real leader in a great struggle. Many of these opponents gathered, strange to say, around Arnold Ruge, a venerable and widely known philosopher and writer, to whom the name of a mere learned man and political dreamer might have been applied even more justly. Then there were groups of socialistic workingmen who partly gathered around Karl Marx and partly around August Willich; and finally, many neutrals, who did not trouble themselves about such party bickerings, but went individually each his own way.

Kinkel certainly was not free from ambition, nor from illusory hopes of a speedy change in the Fatherland. But his first and most natural aim was to make a living for his family in London. This claimed his activity so much that he could not, to so great an extent as he might have wished, take part in the doings of the refugees, a great many of whom had no regular occupation. Neither was it possible for him to keep open house for his political friends and to put his working hours at their disposal, and to make the home of his family the meeting place of a debating club for the constant repetition of things that had been told many times before.

Kinkel was therefore reproached with giving to the cause of the revolution too little, and to his family interests too much of his time and care, and it was said that he was all the more to blame, as he owed his liberation in a high degree to the