Frederick Engels' 
 
                    SOCIALISM: UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC 
 
 
                    1892 English edition Introduction 
 
                             April 20, 1892 
 
 
                               [ part 2 ] 
 
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of the 
towns constituted its revolutionary element.  It had conquered a 
recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization, but this 
position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power.  The 
development of the middle-class, the _bourgeoisie_, became incompatible 
with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, 
had to fall.  
 
But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic 
Church.  It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite of 
all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to 
the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries.  It had organized 
its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far 
the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully 1/3rd of the 
soil of the Catholic world.  Before profane feudalism could be 
successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred 
central organization, had to be destroyed.  
 
Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the great 
revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology 
were again cultivated.  And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its 
industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical 
properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of 
Nature.  Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the 
Church, had not been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for 
that reason had been no science at all.  Science rebelled against the 
Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, 
had to join in the rebellion.  
 
The above, though touching but two of the points where the rising 
middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established 
religion, will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most 
directly interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman 
Church was the bourgeoisie; and second, that every struggle against 
feudalism, at that time, had to take on a religious disguise, had to be 
directed against the Church in the first instance.  But if the 
universities and the traders of the cities started the cry, it was sure 
to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses of the country 
people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle for their very 
existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.  
 
The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three 
great, decisive battles.  
 
The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany.  The 
war cry raised against the Church, by Luther, was responded to by two 
insurrections of a political nature; first, that of the lower nobility 
under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525.  
Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the 
parties most interested, the burghers of the towns -- an indecision into 
the causes of which we cannot here enter.  From that moment, the 
struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the 
central power, and ended by blotting out Germany, for 200 years, from 
the politically active nations of Europe.  The Lutheran Reformation 
produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy.  
No sooner were the peasant of North-east Germany converted to 
Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.  
 
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day.  Calvin's creed was one fit 
for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time.  His predestination 
doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial 
world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's 
activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him.  
It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy 
of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a 
period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and 
centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to 
the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith -- 
the value of gold and silver -- began to totter and to break down.  
Calvin's church constitution of God was republicanized, could the 
kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? 
While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, 
Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties 
in England, and, above all, Scotland.  
 
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine 
ready cut and dried.  This upheaval took place in England.  The 
middle-class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country 
districts fought it out.  Curiously enough, in all the three great 
bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the 
fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once 
gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that 
victory.  A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of england had 
almost disappeared.  Anyhow, had it not been for that yeomanry and for 
the _plebian_ element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never 
have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have 
brought Charles I to the scaffold.  In order to secure even those 
conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, 
the revolution had to be carried considerably further -- exactly as in 
1793 in France and 1848 in Germany.  This seems, in fact, to be one of 
the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.  
 
Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily 
followed the inevitable reaction which, in its turn, went beyond the 
point where it might have maintained itself.  After a series of 
oscillations, the new centre of gravity was at last attained and became 
a new starting-point.  The grand period of English history, known to 
respectability under the name of "the Great Rebellion", and the 
struggles succeeding it, were brought to a close by the comparatively 
puny events entitled by Liberal historians "the Glorious Revolution".  
 
The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising middle-class 
and the ex-feudal landowners.  The latter, though called, as now, the 
aristocracy, had been long since on the way which led them to become 
what Louis Philippe in France became at a much later period: "The first 
bourgeois of the kingdom".  Fortunately for England, the old feudal 
barons had killed one another during the War of the Roses.  Their 
successors, though mostly scions of the old families, had been so much 
out of the direct line of descent that they constituted quite a new 
body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal.  They 
fully understood the value of money, and at once began to increase their 
rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing them with 
sheep.  Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands, created fresh 
bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscation of 
estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued 
during the whole of the 17th century, had the same result.  
Consequently, ever since Henry VII, the English "aristocracy", far from 
counteracting the development of industrial production, had, on the 
contrary, sought to indirectly profit thereby; and there had always been 
a section of the great landowners willing, from economical or political 
reasons, to cooperate with the leading men of the financial and 
industrial bourgeoisie.  The compromise of 1689 was, therefore, easily 
accomplished.  The political spoils of "pelf and place" were left to the 
great landowning families, provided the economic interests of the 
financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-class were sufficiently 
attended to.  And these economic interests were at that time powerful 
enough to determine the general policy of the nation.  There might be 
squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic 
oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was 
irretrievably bound up with that of the industrial and commercial 
middle-class.  
 
From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a recognized, 
component of the ruling classes of England.  With the rest of them, it 
had a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass of 
the nation.  The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the position 
of master, or, as it was until lately called, of "natural superior" to 
his clerks, his work-people, his domestic servants.  His interest was to 
get as much and as good work out of them as he could; for this end, they 
had to be trained to proper submission.  He was himself religious; his 
religion had supplied the standard under which he had fought the king 
and the lords; he was not long in discovering the opportunities this 
same religion offered him for working upon the minds of his natural 
inferiors, and making them submissive to the behests of the masters it 
had pleased God to place over them.  In short, the English bourgeoisie 
now had to take a part in keeping down the "lower orders", the great 
producing mass of the nation, and one of the means employed for that 
purpose was the influence of religion.  
 
There was another factor that contributed to strengthen the religious 
leanings of the bourgeoisie.  That was the rise of materialism in 
England.  This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the 
middle-class; it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars 
and cultivated men of the world, in contrast to religion, which was good 
enough for the uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie.  With 
Hobbes, it stepped on the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and 
omnipotence; it called upon absolute monarchy to keep down that _puer 
robustus sed malitiosus_ ["Robust but malicious boy"] -- to wit, the 
people.  Similarly, with the successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, 
Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic form of materialism remained an 
aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore, hateful to the 
middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its anti-bourgeois 
political connections.  Accordingly, in opposition to the materialism 
and deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had furnished 
the flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts continued to 
furnish the main strength of the progressive middle-class, and form even 
today the backbone of "the Great Liberal Party".  
 
In the meantime, materialism passed from England to France, where it met 
and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers, a 
branch of Cartesianism.  In France, too, it remained at first an 
exclusively aristocratic doctrine.  But, soon, its revolutionary 
character asserted itself.  The French materialists did not limit their 
criticism to matters of religious belief; they extended it to whatever 
scientific tradition or political institution they met with; and to 
prove the claim of their doctrine to universal application, they took 
the shortest cut, and boldly applied it to all subjects of knowledge in 
the giant work after which they were named -- the Encyclopaedia.  Thus, 
in one or the other of its two forms -- avowed materialism or deism -- 
it became the creed of the whole cultures youth of France; so much so 
that, when the Great Revolution broke out, the doctrine hatched by 
English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French Republicans and 
Terrorists, and furnished the text for the Declaration of the Rights of 
Man.  The Great French Revolution was the third uprising of the 
bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast off the religious 
cloak, and was fought out on undisguised political lines; it was the 
first, too, that was really fought out up to the destruction of one of 
the combatants, the aristocracy, and the complete triumph of the other, 
the bourgeoisie.  In England, the continuity of pre-revolutionary and 
post-revolutionary institutions, and the compromise between landlords 
and capitalists, found its expression in the continuity of judicial 
precedents and in the religious preservation of the feudal forms of the 
law.  In France, the Revolution constituted a complete breach with the 
traditions of the past; it cleared out the very last vestiges of 
feudalism, and created in the Code Civil a masterly adaptation of the 
old Roman law -- that almost perfect expression of the juridical 
relations corresponding to the economic stage called by Marx the 
production of commodities -- to modern capitalist conditions; so 
masterly that this French revolutionary code still serves as a model for 
reforms of the law of property in all other countries, not excepting 
England.  Let us, however, not forget that if English law continues to 
express the economic relations of capitalist society in that barbarous 
feudal language which corresponds to the thing expressed, just as 
English spelling corresponds to English pronunciation -- vous ecrivez 
Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople, said a Frenchman -- that same 
English law is the only one which has preserved through ages, nd 
transmitted to America and the Colonies, the best part of that old 
Germanic personal freedom, local self-government, and independence from 
all interference (but that of the law courts), which on the Continent 
has been lost during the period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere 
been as yet fully recovered.  
 
To return to our British bourgeois.  The French Revolution gave him a 
splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies, to 
destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, nd to crush 
the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry.  That was one reason 
why he fought it.  Another was that the ways of this revolution went 
very much against his grain.  Not only its "execrable" terrorism, but 
the very attempt to carry bourgeois rule to extremes.  What should the 
British bourgeois do without his aristocracy, that taught him manners, 
such as they were, and invented fashions for him -- that furnished 
officers for the army, which kept order at home, and the navy, which 
conquered colonial possessions and new markets aboard? There was, 
indeed, a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that minority whose 
interests were not so well attended to under the compromise; this 
section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy middle-class, did 
sympathize with the Revolution, but it was powerless in Parliament.  
 
This, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution, the 
God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion.  Had 
not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if the 
religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism spread 
from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar 
doctrinal currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, 
materialism and free thought generally became, on the Continent, the 
necessary qualifications of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the 
English middle-class stuck to its manifold religious creeds.  These 
creeds might differ from one another, but they were, all of them, 
distinctly religious, Christian creeds.  
 
While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie in 
France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others, initiated an 
industrial revolution, which completely shifted the centre of gravity of 
economic power.  The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably 
faster than that of the landed aristocracy.  Within the bourgeoisie 
itself, the financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more and more 
pushed into the background by the manufacturers.  The compromise of 
1689, even after the gradual changes it had undergone in favor of the 
bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded to the relative position of the 
parties to it.  The character of these parties, too, had changed; the 
bourgeoisie of 1830 was very different from that of the preceding 
century.  The political power still left to the aristocracy, and used by 
them to resist the pretensions of the new industrial bourgeoisie, became 
incompatible with the new economic interests.  A fresh struggle with the 
aristocracy was necessary; it could end only in a victory of the new 
economic power.  First, the Reform Act was pushed through, in spite of 
all resistance, under the impulse of the French Revolution of 1830.  It 
gave to the bourgeoisie a recognized and powerful place in Parliament.  
Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws [a move toward free-trade], which 
settled, once and for all, the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, and 
especially of its most active portion, the manufacturers, over the 
landed aristocracy.  This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie; 
it was, however, also the last it gained in its own exclusive interest.  
Whatever triumphs it obtained alter on, it had to share with a new 
social power -- first its ally, but soon its rival.  
 
The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing 
capitalists, but also a class -- and a far more numerous one -- of 
manufacturing work-people.  This class gradually increased in numbers, 
in proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of 
manufacture after another, and in the same proportion it increased its 
power.  This power it proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant 
Parliament to repeal the acts forbidding combinations of workmen.  
During the Reform agitation, the workingmen constituted the Radical wing 
of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having excluded them from the 
suffrage, the formulated their demands in the People's Charter, and 
constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois Anti-Corn 
Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the first 
working-men's party of modern times.  
 
Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March 1848, in 
which the working people played such a prominent part, and, at least in 
Paris, put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from the 
point of view of capitalist society.  And then came the general 
reaction.  First, the defeat of the Chartists on April 10, 1848; then 
the crushing of the Paris workingmen's insurrection in June of the same 
year; then the disasters of 1849 in Italy, Hungary, South Germany, and 
at last the victory of Louis Bonaparte over Paris, December 2, 1851.  
For a time, at least, the bugbear of working-class pretensions was put 
down, but at what cost! If the British bourgeois had been convinced 
before of the necessity of maintaining the common people in a religious 
mood, how much more must he feel that necessity after all these 
experiences? Regardless of the sneers of his Continental compeers, he 
continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, 
upon the evangelization of the lower orders; not content with his own 
native religious machinery, he appealed to Brother Jonathan [5], the 
greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade, and imported 
from America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the like [6]; and, 
finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the Salvation Army, which 
revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the 
elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters an element 
of early Christian class antagonism, which one day may become 
troublesome to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for 
it.  
 
It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie can in no 
European country get hold of political power -- at least for any length 
of time -- in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy 
kept hold of it during the Middle Ages.  Even in France, where feudalism 
was completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie as a whole has held full 
possession of the Government for very short periods only.  During Louis 
Philippe's reign, 1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled 
the kingdom; by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage by 
the high qualification.  Under the Second Republic, 1848-51, the whole 
bourgeoisie ruled but for three years only; their incapacity brought on 
the Second Empire.  It is only now, in the Third Republic, that the 
bourgeoisie as a whole have kept possession of the helm for more than 20 
years; and they are already showing lively signs of decadence.  A 
durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been possible only in countries 
like America, where feudalism was unknown, and society at the very 
beginning started from a bourgeois basis.  And even in France and 
America, the successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people, are 
already knocking at the door.  
 
In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway.  Even the victory 
of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession of 
all the leading Government offices.  The meekness with which the 
middle-class submitted to this remained inconceivable to me until the 
great Liberal manufacturer, Mr. W. A.  Forster, in a public speech, 
implored the young men of Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on 
in the world, and quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked 
when, as a Cabinet Minister, he had to move in society where French was, 
at least, as necessary as English! The fact was, the English 
middle-class of that time were, as a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, 
and could not help leaving to the aristocracy those superior Government 
places where other qualifications were required than mere insular 
narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business sharpness.[7] Even 
now the endless newspaper debates about middle-class education show that 
the English middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough for 
the best education, and looks to something more modest.  Thus, even 
after the repeal of the Corn Laws, it appeared a matter of course that 
the men who had carried the day -- the Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc.  
-- should remain excluded from a share in the official government of the 
country, until 20 years afterwards a new Reform Act opened to them the 
door of the Cabinet.  The English bourgeoisie are, up to the present 
day, so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that 
they keep up, at their own expense and that of the nation, an ornamental 
caste of drones to represent the nation worthily at all State functions; 
and they consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves 
is found worthy of admission into this select and privileged body, 
manufactured, after all, by themselves.  
 
The industrial and commercial middle-class had, therefore, not yet 
succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political 
power when another competitor, the working-class, appeared on the stage.  
The reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental 
revolutions, as well as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 
1848-66 (ascribed vulgarly to Free Trade alone, but due far more to the 
colossal development of railways, ocean steamers, and means of 
intercourse generally), had again driven the working-class into the 
dependency of the Liberal party, of which they formed, as in 
pre-Chartist times, the Radical wing.  Their claims to the franchise, 
however, gradually became irresistible; while the Whig leaders of the 
Liberals "funked", Disraeli showed his superiority by making the Tories 
seize the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in the 
boroughs, along with a redistribution of seats.  Then followed the 
ballot; then, in 1884, the extension of household suffrage to the 
counties and a fresh redistribution of seats, by which electoral 
districts were, to some extent, equalized.  All these measures 
considerably increased the electoral power of the working-class, so much 
so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies that class now furnished 
the majority of the voters.  But parliamentary government is a capital 
school for teaching respect for tradition; if the middle-class look with 
awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully called "our old 
nobility", the mass of the working-people then looked up with respect 
and deference to what used to be designated as "their betters", the 
middle-class.  Indeed, the British workman, some 15 years ago, was the 
model workman, whose respectful regard for the position of his master, 
and whose self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself, 
consoled our German economists of the _Katheder-Socialist_ school for 
the incurable communistic and revolutionary tendencies of their own 
working-men at home.  
 
But the English middle-class -- good men of business as they are -- saw 
farther than the German professors.  They had shared their powers but 
reluctantly with the working-class.  They had learnt, during the 
Chartist years, what that _puer robustus sed malitiosus_, the people, is 
capable of.  And since that time, they had been compelled to incorporate 
the better part of the People's Charter in the Statutes of the United 
Kingdom.  Now, if ever, the people must be kept in order by moral means, 
and the first and foremost of all moral means of action upon the masses 
is and remains -- religion.  Hence the parsons' majorities on the School 
Boards, hence the increasing self-taxation of the bourgeoisie for the 
support of all sorts of revivalism, from ritualism to the Salvation 
Army.  
 
And now came the triumph of British respectability over the free thought 
and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois.  The workmen of 
France and Germany had become rebellious.  They were thoroughly infected 
with Socialism, and, for very good reasons, were not at all particular 
as to the legality of the means by which to secure their own ascendancy.  
The _puer robustus_, here, turned from day-to-day more _malitiosus_.  
Nothing remained to the French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource 
but to silently drop their free thought, as a youngster, when 
sea-sickness creeps upon him, quietly drops the burning cigar he brought 
swaggeringly on board; one-by-one, the scoffers turned pious in outward 
behavior, spoke with respect of the Church, its dogmas and rites, and 
even conformed with the latter as far as could not be helped.  French 
bourgeois dined _maigre_ on Fridays, and German ones say out long 
Protestant sermons in their pews on Sundays.  They had come to grief 
with materialism.  "Die Religion muss dem Volk erhalten werden" -- 
religion must be kept alive for the people -- that was the only and the 
last means to save society from utter ruin.  Unfortunately for 
themselves, they did not find this out until they had done their level 
best to break up religion for ever.  And now it was the turn of the 
British bourgeoisie to sneer and to say: "Why, you fools, I could have 
told you that 200 years ago!" 
 
However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the British, nor 
the _post festum_ conversion of the Continental bourgeois will stem the 
rising Proletarian tide.  Tradition is a great retarding force, is the 
_vis inertiae_ of history, but, being merely passive, is sure to be 
broken down; and thus religion will be no lasting safeguard to 
capitalist society.  If our juridical, philosophical, and religious 
ideas are the more or less remote offshoots of the economical relations 
prevailing in a given society, such ideas cannot, in the long run, 
withstand the effects of a complete change in these relations.  And, 
unless we believe in supernatural revelation, we must admit that no 
religious tenets will ever suffice to prop up a tottering society.  
 
In fact, in England too, the working-people have begun to move again.  
They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds.  Bourgeois 
traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can be but two 
parties, Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working-class must 
work out its salvation by and through the great Liberal Party.  
Working-men's traditions, inherited from their first tentative efforts 
at independent action, such as the exclusion, from ever so many old 
Trade Unions, of all applicants who have not gone through a regular 
apprenticeship; which means the breeding, by every such union, of its 
own blacklegs.  But, for all that, the English working-class is moving, 
as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had to report to his brother 
Katheder-Socialists.  It moves, like all things in England, with a slow 
and measured step, with hesitation here, with more or less unfruitful, 
tentative attempts there; it moves now and then with an over-cautious 
mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually absorbs the 
substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of the workers 
after another.  It has now shaken out of their torpor the unskilled 
laborers of the East End of London, and we all know what a splendid 
impulse these fresh forces have given it in return.  And if the pace of 
the movement is not up to the impatience of some people, let them not 
forget that it is the working-class which keeps alive the finest 
qualities of the English character, and that, if a step in advance is 
once gained in England, it is, as a rule, never lost afterwards.  If the 
sons of the old Chartists, for reasons unexplained above, were not quite 
up to the mark, the grandsons bid fair to be worthy of their 
forefathers.  
 
But the triumph of the European working-class does not depend upon 
England alone.  It can only be secured by the cooperation of, at least, 
England, France, and Germany.  In both the latter countries, the 
working-class movement is well ahead of England.  In Germany, it is even 
within measurable distance of success.  The progress it has there made 
during the last 25 years is unparalleled.  It advances with 
ever-increasing velocity.  If the German middle-class have shown 
themselves lamentably deficient in political capacity, discipline, 
courage, energy, and perseverance, the German working-class have given 
ample proof of all these qualities.  Four hundred years ago, Germany was 
the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European middle-class; 
as things are now, is it outside the limits of possibility that Germany 
will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the European 
proletariat? 
 
                                                        FREDERICK ENGELS 
London 
April 20, 1892 
 
 
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