s carried out
under a banner totally different from that under which the Prussian
bourgeoisie was preparing to defy its Government. The Revolution of
February upset, in France, the very same sort of Government which the
Prussian bourgeoisie were going to set up in their own country. The
Revolution of February announced itself as a revolution of the
working classes against the middle classes; it proclaimed the downfall
of middle-class government and the emancipation of the workingman. Now
the Prussian bourgeoisie had, of late, had quite enough of
working-class agitation in their own country. After the first terror
of the Silesian riots had passed away, they had even tried to give
this agitation a turn in their own favor; but they always had retained
a salutary horror of revolutionary Socialism and Communism; and,
therefore, when they saw men at the head of the Government in Paris
whom they considered as the most dangerous enemies of property, order,
religion, family, and of the other _Penates_ of the modern bourgeois,
they at once experienced a considerable cooling down of their own
revolutionary ardor. They knew that the moment must be seized, and
that, without the aid of the working masses, they would be defeated;
and yet their courage failed them. Thus they sided with the Government
in the first partial and provincial outbreaks, tried to keep the
people quiet in Berlin, who, during five days, met in crowds before
the royal palace to discuss the news and ask for changes in the
Government; and when at last, after the news of the downfall of
Metternich, the King made some slight concessions, the bourgeoisie
considered the Revolution as completed, and went to thank His Majesty
for having fulfilled all the wishes of his people. But then followed
the attack of the military on the crowd, the barricades, the struggle,
and the defeat of royalty. Then everything was changed; the very
working classes, which it had been the tendency of the bourgeoisie to
keep in the background, had been pushed forward, had fought and
conquered, and all at once were conscious of their strength.
Restrictions of suffrage, of the liberty of the press, of the right to
sit on juries, of the right of meeting--restrictions that would have
been very agreeable to the bourgeoisie because they would have touched
upon such classes only as were beneath them--now were no longer
possible. The danger of a repetition of the Parisian scenes of
"anarchy" was imminen