But what purpose this organization should serve depended very substantially on whether the prospects of a renewed upsurge of the revolution were realized.And in the course of the year 1850 this became more and more improbable, indeed impossible.The industrial crisis of 1847, which had paved the way for the Revolution of 1848, had been overcome; a new, unprecedented period of industrial prosperity had set in; whoever had eyes to see and used them must have clearly realized that the revolutionary storm of 1848 was gradually spending itself.
"With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, _there can be no talk of a real revolution_.Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come in collision with each other.
The various quarrels in which the representatives of the industrial factions of the continental party of order now indulge and mutually compromise themselves, far from providing the occassion for new revolutions are, on the contrary, possible only because the basis of the relationships is momentarily so secure and, what the reaction does not know, so _bourgeois_.From it all attempts of the reaction to hold up bourgeois development _will rebound just as certainly as all moral indignation and all enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats_".
Thus Marx and I wrote in the "Revue of May to October 1850" in the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_, _Politisch-okonomische Revue_, Nos.V and VI, Hamburg, 1850, p.153.
This cool estimation of the situation, however, was regarded as heresy among many persons, at a time when Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Mazzini, Kossuth and, among the lesser German lights, Ruge, Kinkel, Gogg and the rest of them crowded in London to form provisional governments of the future not only for their respective fatherlands but for the whole of Europe, and when the only still still necessary was to obtain the requisite money from America as a loan for the revolution to realize at a moment's notice the European revolution and the various republics which went with it was a matter of course.Can anyone be surprised that a man like Willich was taken in by this, that Schapper, acting on his old revolutionary impulse, also allowed himself to be fooled, and that the majority of the London workers, to a large extent refugees themselves, followed them into the camp of the bourgeois-democratic artificers of revolution? Suffice it to say that the reserve maintained by us was not to the mind of these people; one was to enter into the game of making revolutions.We most decidedly refused to do so.Asplit ensued; more about this is to be read in the _Revelations_.Then came the arrest of Nothjung, followed by that of Haupt, in Hamburg.The latter turned traitor by divulging the names of the Cologne Central Committee and being slated as the chief witness in the trial; but his relatives had no desires to be thus disgraced and bundled him off to Rio de Janerio, where he later established himself as a businessman and in recognition of his services was appointed first Prussian and then German Consul General.He is now again in Europe.
[Engels footnote: Schapper in London at the end of the sixties.Willich took part in the American Civil War with distinction; he became Brigadier-General and was shot in the chest during the battle of Murfreesboro (Tennessee) but recovered and died about ten years ago in America.Of the other persons mentioned above, I will only remark that Heinrich Bauer was lost track of in Australia, and that Weitling and Ewerbeck died in America.]
For a better understanding of the _Revelations_, I give the list of the Cologne accused:
(1) P.G.Roser, cigarmaker;
