Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - No Compromises No Political Trading (1900).pdf/24

 foresaw in the victory of the proletariat the downfall of capitalism. In France Napoleon was elected President, and in Germany the bourgeoisie even in the honeymoon of the March revolution longed for a deliverer which would down the red specter. Thus the "black reaction," which in 1849 followed our revolution, was in fact simply the true character of this revolution, stripped of its phantastic deceptive dress of gilded phrases. Under the rule of capitalism the bourgeoisie was forced to become politically reactionary so far as it was capitalistic or stood under capitalistic influence. The "black reaction" which half a century ago spread over the European continent, was just as much a historical necessity as the still blacker reaction of the present zigzag policy of penitentiary bills which capitalism in a fit of desperation has forced upon us.

In Germany where capitalism was developed later than in England and France, and where it was not preceded, as in those two countries, by an era of economic prosperity for the bourgeoisie as well as of political supremacy by it, the whole political development was obliged to take on a different character. There a soil cleared of medieval mould and undergrowth; here, the most modern of modern conditions, as modern as in France and England, in between medieval mould and undergrowth; the healthy growth entwined with ivy which sucks the life out of everything that it clasps with its tendrils; which only lives from death and rottenness and which must be torn off and grubbed up to