X. Patrons and Accomplices

• • Introduction and preface
  • I. The Brimstone Gang
  • II. The Bristlers
  • III. Police Matters
  • IV. Techow's Letter
  • V. Imperial Regent and Count Palatine
  • VI. Vogt and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
  • VII. The Augsburg Campaign
  • VIII. Dâ-Dâ Vogt and his Studies "Sine Studio"
  • IX. Agency
  • X. Patrons and Accomplices
  • XI. A Lawsuit
  • XII. Appendices

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Principibus placuisse viris non ultima laus est.

As guarantors of his "good behaviour" the ex-Vogt of the Empire proposes

"Kossuth" and "the two other men—Fazy, the regenerator of Geneva, and Klapka, the defender of Komorn"—whom he "proudly calls his friends" ("Magnum Opus", p. 213).

I call them his patrons. After the battle of Komorn (July 2, 1849) Görgey usurped the supreme command of the Hungarian army in defiance of the orders of the Hungarian Government, which had dismissed him.

"If an energetic man had stood at the head of the government," writes Colonel Lapinski, who was still a supporter of Kossuth when he wrote his book, "a stop could have been put to all of Görgey's intrigues even at that time. Kossuth needed only to come into the camp and say a few words to the army and all of Görgey's popularity would not have saved him from defeat...: But Kossuth did not come; he was not forceful enough to oppose Görgey in public and so while he intrigued against the general in secret, he attempted to justify the latter's misdemeanours in the eyes of the world." (Th. Lapinski, Feldzug der Ungarischen Hauptarmee, etc., pp. 125, 126).

On his own admission, Kossuth was officially informed of Görgey's intended betrayal some time later by General Guyon (see David Urquhart, Visit to the Hungarian Exiles at Kutayah).

"It is true that Kossuth did say in the course of a fine speech in Szeged that if he knew that anyone was a traitor he would murder him with his own hands. He may have had Görgey in mind as he spoke. However, not only did he not carry out this somewhat theatrical threat, he did not even tell all his Ministers just whom he had under suspicion; while he was busy forging miserable plans against Görgey with some of them, [...] he always spoke of him with the greatest respect and even wrote letters to him couched in the most amicable terms. Others may understand him but I cannot understand how it was possible for him to realise that the salvation of the nation wholly depended on the fall of a dangerous man and yet to make no more than a tentative gesture to bring him down, while at the same time supporting him, winning new adherents and admirers to his cause by expressing his confidence in him, and thus placing all the power into his hands. While Kossuth vacillated in this pusillanimous way, working now for Görgey and now against him ... Görgey, who was more consistent and resolute than Kossuth, put his evil plan into practice" (Th. Lapinski, loc. cit., pp. 163, 164).

On August 11, 1849, on Görgey orders, Kossuth issued a manifesto, ostensibly from the fortress of Arad, announcing his abdication and conferring on Görgey "supreme government authority in both military and civilian affairs". He went on to say:

"After the unfortunate outcome of the battles which God has visited upon the nation in recent days, there is no longer any hope that we can continue our defensive struggle against the combined forces of the two great powers [...] with any prospect of success."

Having thus stated at the beginning of the manifesto that Hungary's cause was irrevocably lost, and moreover as a result of Divine visitation, Kossuth goes on to make Görgey "responsible before God for deploying the power" placed by Kossuth at his disposal "for the salvation" of Hungary. He trusted Görgey enough to deliver Hungary up to him, but too little to deliver up his own person to him. His personal distrust of Görgey was so intense that he contrived it so that the arrival of his deed of abdication in Görgey hands coincided with his own arrival on Turkish soil. This is why he concludes his manifesto with the words:

"If my death can be of any use to my country, I shall sacrifice my own life with joy"

What he had sacrificed on the altar of his country, handing it over to Görgey, was the government, the title to which however he at once usurped again under Turkish protection.

In Kütahya His Excellency, the Governor in partibus, received a copy of the first Blue Book on the Hungarian catastrophe laid before Parliament by Palmerston. As he wrote to David Urquhart, the study of these diplomatic documents convinced him that "Russia had a spy, nay an agent even, in every Cabinet" and that in the Russian interest Palmerston had betrayed dear Hungary. And the first words that fell from his lips when he stepped onto English soil in Southampton were: "Palmerston, the dear friend of my bosom!"

After he was freed from internment in Turkey Kossuth sailed to England. Off the coast of Marseilles, where he was forbidden to land, he issued a manifesto whose tenor and phraseology were those of French social democracy. Having set foot on English soil he at once repudiated

"that novel doctrine, social democracy, which rightly or wrongly is held to be incompatible with social order and the security of property. Hungary neither has nor wishes to have anything to do with these doctrines, if only for the extremely simple reason that in Hungary there is no opportunity nor even the slightest inducement for them to be introduced." (Cf. the letter from Marseilles.)

During the first two weeks of his stay in England he changed his confession of faith as frequently as his audience—he was all things to all men. Count Kasimir Batthyány gave this explanation of his public breach with Kossuth which took place at this time:

"It is not just the bévues that Kossuth has committed in the first two weeks since his release that have induced me to take this step, but all my experience of him, everything I have seen, suffered, allowed, endured, and, as you will recall, disguised and concealed, at first in Hungary and then in exile,—in short it is a matter of the opinion I have formed about the man.... Permit me to remark that whatever Mr. Kossuth has said or may say in Southampton, Wisbech or London, in England, in short, cannot undo what he said in Marseilles. In the land of the 'young giant'" (America) "he will again sing a different tune, for just as he is unscrupulous in other matters and bends like a reed beneath any gust of wind, so too does he gainsay his own words sans gêne, and does not hesitate to hide behind the great names of men now dead whom he has ruined, such as my poor cousin, Louis Batthyány.... I do not hesitate to declare that before Kossuth leaves England you will have good reason to regret the honours you have squandered on a most undeserving heart" (Correspondence of Kossuth, letter of Count Batthyány to Mr. Urquhart, Paris, October 29, 1851).

Kossuth's performance in the United States, where he spoke against slavery in the North and for slavery in the South, left behind nothing but a great sense of disappointment and 300 dead speeches. Bringing the curtain down hastily on this peculiar episode, I would only remark that he strongly recommended the Germans in the United States, and in particular the German emigration, to conclude an alliance between Germany, Hungary and Italy, to the exclusion of France (and not just the coup d'état government, but France itself, and even the French emigration together with the parties in France represented by it). No sooner had he returned to London than he attempted to establish relations with Louis Bonaparte through the agency of Count Szirmay, a dubious character, and through Colonel Kiss in Paris (see my letter in the New-York Tribune of September 28, 1852 and my public declaration in the same paper on November 16, 1852).

During the Mazzini rising in Milan in 1853 a proclamation appeared on the walls of the town addressed to the Hungarian troops stationed there and calling on them to join the Italian insurgents. It bore the signature: Louis Kossuth. Scarcely had the news of the defeat of the insurgents reached London when Kossuth hastened to publish a statement in The Times and other English papers, declaring the proclamation to be a forgery and thereby publicly contradicting his friend Mazzini. The proclamation was nevertheless authentic. Mazzini had obtained it from Kossuth, he owned the original manuscript in Kossuth's handwriting and he had acted in concert with Kossuth. Convinced that Austrian despotism in Italy could only be overthrown by the united action of Italy and Hungary, Mazzini then first tried to replace Kossuth with a more reliable Hungarian leader, but after this attempt had failed because of the divisions within the Hungarian emigration, he forgave his unreliable ally and magnanimously abstained from an exposure which was bound to destroy Kossuth's reputation in England.

The same year, 1853, it will be remembered, saw the beginning of the Russo-Turkish war. On December 17, 1850 Kossuth had written to David Urquhart from Kütahya:

"Take away the Turkish supremacy from Turkey and it will cease to be. And after all, as matters stand, Turkey is indispensably necessary to the freedom of the world."

His enthusiasm for the Turks was even greater in a letter he wrote to the Grand Vizier Reshid Pasha on February 15, 1851. In extravagant phrases he offered his services to the Turkish Government. On January 22, 1852, during his tour of the United States, he wrote to David Urquhart:

"Would you feel inclined, knowing how much the interests of Hungary and Turkey were identical, to plead my cause at Constantinople? The Porte did not know who I am when I was there. My reception in England and America, and the position in which the chances of fortune, and I may say Providence, have placed me, could show the Porte that I am a true friend, and perhaps a not uninfluential one, of Turkey and her future."

On November 5, 1853 he wrote to Mr. Crawshay (an Urquhartist), offering to go to Constantinople as an ally of Turkey, but "not with empty hands", and therefore asked Mr. Crawshay to raise funds

"by private applications addressed confidentially to such liberal men as might well afford the assistance he required".

In this letter he says: "I hate and despise the artifice of making revolutions." At the same time as he was penning letters to the Urquhartists that overflowed with hatred of revolutions and love for the Turks, he issued manifestos together with Mazzini which proclaimed the expulsion of the Turks from Europe and the transformation of Turkey into an "oriental Switzerland", and also signed the exhortations to revolution in general put out by the so-called Central Committee of European Democracy.

Since as early as the end of 1853 Kossuth had aimlessly squandered the money he had collected in America in 1852 by his speechifying in the name of Hungary, and since moreover his plea to Mr. Crawshay fell on deaf ears, the Governor abandoned his intended chivalrous journey to Constantinople, but instead he sent his agent, Colonel Johann Bangya, supplying him with the best possible recommendations.

A military tribunal held in Aderbi in Circassia on January 20, 1858 unanimously passed a sentence of death on "Mehemed Bey, formerly Johann Bangya d'Illosfalva, who on his own admission and on the evidence of witnesses had been found guilty of high treason and conducting a secret correspondence with the enemy" (the Russian general Philipson) However, this did not prevent him from living peacefully in Constantinople to this very day. In a handwritten confession submitted to the tribunal, Bangya said inter alia.

"My political action was entirely dictated by the chief of my country, Louis Kossuth.... Provided with letters of introduction from my political chief, I came to Constantinople on the 22nd December, 1853."

He goes on to describe how he became a Moslem and entered the Turkish service with the rank of colonel.

"My instructions" (from Kossuth) "insisted that I should get attached in some way or other to troops which were to take part in operations on the Circassian coast."

His task there was to prevent the Circassians from taking any part in the war against Russia. He carried out his mission successfully and towards the close of the war he sent "Kossuth a detailed account of the situation in Circassia" from Constantinople. Before his second expedition to Circassia, which he undertook together with the Poles, he received an order from Kossuth to collaborate with certain Hungarians, among whom was General Stein (Ferhad Pasha).

"Captain Franchini," he says, "military secretary to the Russian Ambassador was present at several of our conferences. The object was to win over Circassia to Russian interests in a peaceable, slow, but sure manner. [...] Before the expedition set out from Constantinople" (mid-February 1857), "I received letters and instructions from Kossuth approving my plan of operations."

Bangya's treachery came to light in Circassia when a letter to Philipson, the Russian general, was intercepted.

"In conformity with my instructions," Bangya says, "I was to get in touch with the Russian general. For a long time I could not make up my mind to do this, but at last I received orders so precise that it was impossible for me to hesitate any longer."

The proceedings of the military tribunal in Aderbi and especially Bangya's confession made a great sensation in Constantinople, London and New York. Kossuth was repeatedly and urgently pressed, even from the Hungarian side, to make a public statement, but to no avail. To this day he has maintained timorous silence on Bangya's mission in Circassia.

In the autumn of 1858 Kossuth was busy hawking around England and Scotland moderately priced lectures in which he denounced the Austrian concordat and Louis Bonaparte. The passionate fanaticism with which he warned the English to beware of the treacherous designs of Louis Bonaparte, whom he described as the secret ally of Russia, can be seen, e.g., from The Glasgow Sentinel of November 20, 1858. When Louis Bonaparte revealed his Italian plans early in 1859, Kossuth denounced him in Mazzini's Pensiero ed Azione and warned "all true republicans", Italians, Hungarians and even Germans, to beware of allowing themselves to be used as a cat's-paw by the Imperial Quasimodo. In February 1859 Kossuth ascertained that Colonel Kiss, Count Teleki and General Klapka, all of whom had long since belonged to the red camarilla of the Palais Royal, were hatching a conspiracy with Plon-Plon to provoke an uprising in Hungary. Kossuth now threatened a public polemic in the English press unless he too were admitted to the "secret league". Plon-Plon was more than willing to open the doors of the conclave to him. Travelling under the name of Mr. Brown and furnished with an English passport, Kossuth went to Paris in the beginning of May. He hastened to the Palais Royal and expounded his plans for a Hungarian uprising to Plon-Plon at great length. On the evening of May 3 the Prince Rouge accompanied the ex-Governor to the Tuileries in his own carriage, to present him there to the saviour of society. Throughout the meeting with Louis Bonaparte, words failed the normally so eloquent speaker, so that Plon-Plon had to act as spokesman and present Kossuth's programme to his cousin. Kossuth later praised the almost literal accuracy of Plon-Plon's rendering. Having listened attentively to his cousin's exposition, Louis Bonaparte declared that there was only one obstacle preventing him from adopting Kossuth's proposals, and this was Kossuth's republican convictions and republican connections. Thereupon the ex-Governor solemnly abjured his republican faith, protesting that he neither was a republican now, nor had he ever been one, but that political necessity alone and a strange concatenation of circumstances had forced him into an alliance with the republican party of the European emigration. As proof of his anti-republicanism he offered Plon-Plon the Hungarian crown in the name of his country. At that time, this crown had not yet been abolished. Moreover, Kossuth was not officially authorised to auction it, but everyone who has followed his appearances abroad with any attention will have observed that he had long been accustomed to speak of his "dear Hungary" much as a backwoods squire will speak of his estate.

I take his repudiation of republicanism to be sincere. A civil list of 300,000 florins, claimed in Pest to maintain the dignity of the executive; the transfer of the patronage of the hospitals from an Austrian Archduchess to his sister; the attempt to christen a number of regiments with the name of Kossuth; his efforts to form a camarilla; the stubbornness with which he clung to the title of governor when abroad, a title which he had renounced in the moment of danger; his entire subsequent behaviour, much more that of a pretender than a refugee—all that points to tendencies alien to republicanism.

After his formal cleaning of the suspicion of republicanism, an agreement was reached placing 3 million francs at Mr. Kossuth's disposal. There was nothing objectionable about this clause in itself since money was needed to finance the military organisation of the Hungarian refugees, and why should the Governor be denied the same right to receive subsidies from his new ally as had been enjoyed by all the despotic powers of Europe who had been subsidised by England throughout the anti-Jacobin war? Kossuth was given 50,000 francs on the spot as an advance on his personal expenses and he secured certain other pecuniary advantages, a sort of insurance premium, in the event of the premature end to the war. Financial flair and melodramatic emotions are by no means mutually exclusive. After all, as his ex-Finance Minister, Dušek, must be aware, even during the Hungarian revolution Kossuth had taken the precaution of receiving his salary not in Kossuth-notes but in silver or in Austrian banknotes.

Before Kossuth left the Tuileries it was agreed that he should undertake to neutralise the alleged "Austrian tendencies" of the Derby Ministry by launching a neutrality campaign in England. It is known how the voluntary support of the Whigs and the Manchester School enabled him to carry out this initial part of the agreement with the greatest success. A lecturing tour from the Mansion House in London to the Free Trade Hall in Manchester formed an antithesis to the Anglo-Scottish tour of autumn 1858 when he hawked his hatred of Bonaparte and Cherbourg, "the standing menace to England", at a shilling per head.

The larger part of the Hungarian emigration in Europe had withdrawn its support for Kossuth since the end of 1852. The prospect of an invasion of the Adriatic coast with French assistance brought the majority back to his flag. His negotiations with the military sector of his new-found supporters were not without a certain Decembrist flavour. In order to be in a position to assign a larger amount of French money to. them he advanced them to higher military rank, lieutenants, for instance, were promoted to major. To begin with each man received travelling expenses to Turin, then a lavish sum for a uniform (the cost of a major's outfit amounted to £150), and finally six months' advance of salary with the promise of one year's retirement pay after the conclusion of peace. The salaries themselves were not unduly high: 10,000 francs for the supreme general (Klapka), 6,000 francs for the-generals, 5,000 for the brigadiers, 4,000 for the lieutenant-colonels, 3,000 for the majors, and so on. The Hungarian forces assembled in Turin consisted almost entirely of officers without the rank and file, and I have heard many bitter words about this from the "lesser" Hungarian emigration.

General Moritz Perczel, as has already been mentioned, resigned publicly as soon as he had seen through the diplomatic game. Despite Louis Bonaparte's order to the contrary, Klapka insisted on a landing near Fiume, but Kossuth made sure that the Hungarian refugee corps stayed within the theatrical limits laid down by the director of the troupe.

The rumours of the peace signed at Villafranca had hardly arrived in Turin when Kossuth, terrified of being handed over to the Austrians, took to his heels and escaped to Geneva, secretly, behind the back of the military forces at his disposal. At the time neither the name of Francis Joseph, nor that of Louis Bonaparte, stood in such bad odour in the Hungarian camp in Turin as that of Louis Kossuth, but for the fact that the comic side of his latest escapade somewhat overshadowed all criticism. On his return Kossuth published in London a letter to his tame elephant, a certain McAdam in Glasgow, declaring himself to be disillusioned, but not cheated and closing with the emotional statement that he had nowhere to lay his head and that therefore all letters for him should be sent to his friend F. Pulszky, who had offered shelter to the refugee. The more than Anglo-Saxon gruffness with which the London press intimated to Kossuth that he should use the Bonapartist subsidies. to rent himself a house in London convinced him that for the tie being his role in London was at an end.

Apart from his talent as an orator Kossuth also possesses the great gift of silence as soon as the audience shows definite signs of displeasure or he finds himself at a loss for words by which to justify himself. Like the sun he knows all about eclipses. That he was capable of consistency at least once in his life was demonstrated by his recent letter to Garibaldi in which he warned him not to make an attack on Rome lest he offend the Emperor of the French, "the only support of the oppressed nationalities".

Just as, in the first half of the eighteenth century, Alberoni was known as the colossal cardinal, so we may think of Kossuth as a colossal Langenschwarz. He is essentially an improviser who is moulded by the impressions he receives from the audience facing him at a given moment, not an author who stamps his original ideas on the world. Like Blondin on his rope, Kossuth dances on his tongue. Cut off from the mood of his people he was bound to lapse into mere virtuosity and the vices of the virtuoso. The insubstantiality of thought characteristic of the improviser is inevitably reflected in the ambivalence of his actions. If Kossuth was once the Aeolian harp through which the hurricane of the people reverberated, he is now merely the Dionysian ear which echoes in a murmur the whisperings in the mysterious apartments of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries.

It would be quite unjust to place General Klapka, Vogt's second patron, on the same level as Kossuth. Klapka was one of the best Hungarian revolutionary generals. Like the majority of officers who gathered in Turin in 1859 he regards Louis Bonaparte much as Franz Rákóczy regarded Louis XIV. In their eyes Louis Bonaparte represents France's military power, a power which might serve Hungary but which, if only on geographical grounds, could never endanger it. But why does Vogt appeal to the authority of Klapka? Klapka has never made a secret of the fact that he belongs to Plon-Plon's red camarilla. So that "friend" Klapka can vouch for "friend" Vogt? Klapka has shown no great talent in the selection of his friends. One of his closest friends in Komorn was Colonel Assermann. Let us hear about this Colonel Assermann from Colonel Lapinski, who served under Klapka up to the surrender of Komorn and who subsequently distinguished himself in Circassia fighting against the Russians.

"The betrayal at Világos," Lapinski says, "threw the numerous and idle staff officers in Komorn into a state of great terror.... The scented gentlemen with golden collars, many of whom were able neither to hold a rifle nor to command three men, were full of fear running about in confusion and devising plans to save their own skins at any price. These men, who had managed on one pretext or another to leave the main army and withdraw to the cosy safety of the impregnable fortress, without having to perform any labour over and above putting their signature to a receipt once a month acknowledging that their salaries were correct and in order, were terrified by the thought that they were now faced with a life-and-death struggle.... It was these wretches who conjured up dreadful visions of internal unrest, mutiny, etc., in order to make the general surrender the fortress as quickly as possible [...] if they could only save themselves and their property. The latter was of special concern to many of them, for all their endeavours throughout the revolution had been concentrated on enriching themselves, and a number had succeeded. Some individuals managed to enrich themselves quite easily for often half a year would pass before it was necessary to give an account of the funds they had received. Since this was a situation which favoured treachery and fraud many people may have dipped their hands more deeply into the cash-box than they could have justified.... The armistice had been concluded: how was it used? From the supplies in the fortress, which would have lasted a year, unnecessarily large rations were distributed among the villages, while no provisions were brought in from the surrounding area; even the hay and oats which the peasants in the nearby villages wanted to sell was left lying there so that a few weeks later the Cossacks' horses devoured the property of the peasants while we in the fortress complained about the lack of supplies. The cattle in the fortress were for the most part sold off outside the town on the pretext that there was a shortage of fodder. Colonel Assermann presumably did not know that meat can be pickled. A large part of the grain was also sold off on the grounds that it was going mouldy; this was done openly, and even more such things were done secretly. With such a man as Assermann at his side and with a number of similar individuals in his entourage Klapka had of course quickly to abandon every good idea that came into his head; those gentlemen took good care of that... (Lapinski, loc. cit., pp. 202-06).

The memoirs of both Görgey and Klapka provide no less eloquent testimony to Klapka's lack of character and political understanding. All the errors he committed during the defence of Komorn stem from this defect.

"If Klapka with his knowledge and patriotism also had a firm will of his own, and if he had acted in accordance with opinions he had formed himself, rather than with those suggested to him by fools and cowards, the defence of Komorn would sparkle in the annals of history like a meteor" (loc. cit., p. 209).

On August 3, Klapka had gained a brilliant victory over the besieging Austrian corps at Komorn, he had scattered it and put it out of action for some time. He followed this up by taking Raab and could easily take Vienna as well, but for eight days remained irresolute and inactive at Raab and then returned to Komorn where he was met by the news of Görgey's surrender and found a letter from the latter awaiting him. The enemy requested an armistice so that the scattered besieging corps of the Austrians and the Russians advancing from Rima Szombat could be concentrated near Komorn and invest the fortress at their leisure. Instead of attacking and defeating the enemy formations piecemeal before they could join up, Klapka again vacillated irresolutely, but rejected the request of the Austrian and Russian spokesmen for an armistice. At that moment, says Lapinski,

"an adjutant of the Emperor Nicholas arrived in Komorn on August 22.... But, said the Russian Mephisto in honeyed tones, surely you will grant us a two weeks' armistice, General. It is His Majesty, my gracious Emperor, who is asking you! This worked like a quick poison. Where the efforts of the Austrian spokesmen and the arguments of the Russian negotiators had failed, this cunning Russian emissary succeeded with a few brief words. Klapka could not resist the subtle compliment and signed an armistice for 14 days. The fall of Komorn dates from this act".

Klapka allowed the armistice to be used by Colonel Assermann, as we have already mentioned, to disperse in two weeks the provisions of the fortress, which would have lasted a whole year. At the end of the armistice Grabbe invested Komorn from the Vag, while the Austrians, whose forces had gradually grown to 40,000 men, camped on the right bank of the Danube. The inactive life behind the walls and fortifications demoralised the troops inside Komorn. Klapka did not launch a single attack on the Russian besieging corps, which had seen no action yet and was only 19,000 strong. The enemy's preparations for the siege were not disturbed for an instant. In fact, from the moment he had signed the armistice, Klapka prepared everything not for defence but for capitulation. The only energy he showed was of an inquisitorial nature and was directed at the upright officers who were opposed to capitulation.

"In the end," Lapinski says, "it became dangerous to say anything about the Austrians if one wished to avoid arrest."

Finally, on September 27, the capitulation was signed.

"In view of the power, of the desperate situation of the nation, which had put its last hopes in Komorn," Lapinski says, "in view of the situation in Europe and the impotence of Austria, which would have made the greatest sacrifices for the sake of Komorn, the surrender conditions were as wretched as could be imagined."

They "were just sufficient to enable us to escape quickly from Komorn over the frontier", but they did not contain the slightest guarantee either for Hungary or even for the revolutionary generals in the hands of the Austrians. Moreover, they were drawn up in great haste and were so imprecise and ambiguous that it was easy for Haynau to violate them later on.

So much for Klapka. If Vogt is lacking in "character", Klapka is the last man to make good the deficiency.

Vogt's third patron is "James Fazy, the regenerator of Geneva", as he is described by Vogt, his court jester. The following letters, written by Johann Philipp Beckerto the addressee of his letter reproduced earlier, contain a portrait of Fazy which is so apt that any additional comment will only spoil it. I would make only one preliminary remark. The most nauseating feature of Vogt's so-called Studien is the hypocritical show of Lutheran and even Calvinist horror of the "ultramontane party". Thus, for example, he confronts Germany with the absurd alternative of either giving Louis Bonaparte a free hand or submitting to the domination of the Austrian concordat, and "verily we should rather prefer to undergo a second period of national humiliation" (Studien, p. 52). In the nasal tones of the puritan he fumes about

the ultramontane party, the sworn enemy of humanity, this monster that is attacking its very core" (loc. cit., p. 120).

He has of course never heard of the fact which even Dupin Aîné revealed in the Decembrist Senate, that

"under Louis Bonaparte's régime the congregations, associations and foundations of all kinds directly subject to the Order of Jesuits have become more numerous than they were under the ancien régime, and that all the state regulations which restricted the ultramontane organs of propaganda even before 1789 have been systematically dismantled by Decembrist legislation and administration".

But Vogt must at any rate know that the rule of his local Bonaparte, M. James Fazy, is based on a long-standing coalition between the so-called radical party and the ultramontane party. When the Vienna Congress incorporated Geneva, the traditional home of Calvinism, into the Swiss Confederation, it added to its territory, along with certain Savoyard districts, a rural Catholic population and the crème of the ultramontane priesthood. It is the alliance with this "sworn enemy of humanity, this monster" which has made Fazy the dictator of Geneva and Vogt Fazy's member of the Council of States. So much by way of introduction.

"Paris, July 2, 1860

"Dear R...,

"At long last I really must comply with your wish and give you my opinion of M. James Fazy....

"Just as the political sciences are of no avail unless one knows how to apply them in real life, so too statesmanship is sterile unless it is based on science and philosophical thought. A so-called statesman who has nothing but theory will not fool anyone and he will soon reveal his incapacity. On the other hand, a man who has a one-track talent for statesmanship can more easily conceal his lack of knowledge and intellectual prowess, he may pass for a practical statesman and gain the support of the great market of mediocrity. Whether or not the rule of such a man can advance the culture of a nation and can create conditions ensuring its undisturbed progress, lies beyond the powers of judgment of the blindly adulating crowd. If there is only the appearance that things are going well and are improving and if only everything is done in the name of freedom and civilisation!

"M. James Fazy is an outstanding specimen of the breed of political virtuosos. This astute man is distinguished not only for his statecraft but largely for his political craftiness. He resorts to all sorts of artifices and produces tours de force as often as the 'public interest' requires it, but with his usual cunning avoids every salto mortale. Full of guile in his manipulation of roles behind the scenes, a skilful director and prompter, he is the ne plus ultra of a French actor. His 'strength of character', which recoils from nothing if only it will serve his purposes, would be much to be admired, were it not for the fact that it is so intimately bound up with the disreputable nature of those purposes. Once one is familiar with the man's lack of principles and moral character, one will be less inclined to admire his ingenuity in devising means and his adroitness in employing them. This political virtuoso contrives by a sleight of hand boldly to appropriate everything good that occurs in the life of the people he governs; he then presents it' to the great mass of the people in his own name so that they believe and are prepared to swear that it has all been brought about by or through the agency of 'Papa Fazy'. With equal skill he manages to shrug off the responsibility for everything that is bad or unpopular and to blame it on others. In his government he will not endure any independent personality, his colleagues must submit to being arbitrarily repudiated or forced to act as godfather for his abortive undertakings. Submitting to his despotic brutality à discrétion[ay], they have always to be prepared to act as the scapegoats and whipping-boys for the sake of the people and the glory of their President. Just as a crowned monarch will always ask himself whether a political measure will damage his dynasty, however much it may be to the advantage of the people, before he 'is pleased' to approve it, so too Papa Fazy asks himself, whenever he plans to take action: 'Will it not topple my presidential chair?' Hence our hero always adapts his policies to circumstances and lives from hand to mouth: on one day he will act out an uproarious comedy in the government, the next day he will perform a conjuring trick in the Grand Council and the day after that he will produce a sensational coup at a popular assembly, and the great mass, skilfully cosseted by him, only too happy to believe in a visible and audible God whom it can worship and pray to, becomes credulous and believes in pennies from heaven when it is only a heavy shower beating down on the roofs. I do not wish to suggest that the people of Geneva are immature and lacking in intelligence; on the contrary, I am convinced that hardly anywhere can one find a more active public life, a more vigorous and conscious endeavour to evolve a free civil society than here on the banks of the Lake of Geneva. I shall return later to the subject and attempt to explain why M. Fazy has nevertheless been able on so many occasions to secure a majority of votes.

"All that has been achieved in Geneva in fifteen years by an energetic generation he has chalked up to the credit of his rule, or he has caused his lackeys and- worshippers to do so. The demolition of the fortifications, the impressive extension and improvement of the capital of the Canton, for instance, pass for his achievement. But every administration, including that of M. Fazy, would have been ruthlessly pushed aside if it had attempted to resist the mighty pressure from the populace to tear down fortifications that had become useless and to expand a town in which health conditions were increasingly deteriorating because of the terrible overcrowding. This question thus also became a question of Fazy's own survival and he energetically took it in hand—honour to whom honour is due—and has helped to carry out many improvements to the general satisfaction of the public. But without arrogant insolence no individual can set himself up as the originator or creator of what has been achieved by the strenuous and joint efforts of a whole generation to satisfy a great need of the age. It is only society as a whole that creates, and then only in a relative sense, an integral whole, to which the members according to their strength and position contribute a larger or smaller share. Blind faith in the authorities is a superstition like any other and is detrimental to any healthy development.

"I am well aware that our M. Fazy is like everyone else in that he only does those things which he cannot refrain from doing, and he only refrains from doing things that he cannot do, and that like every living being, in his desire to develop his own individuality completely, he pursues his own needs. It is just as impossible to expect him to act otherwise as to demand that a cat should go into the water of its own accord or a horse climb trees. If he acted differently he would not be James Fazy, and if he were not James Fazy he might perhaps be Louis Bonaparte or something of the sort. If greatness in a man who possesses power is to keep a people in leading-strings, to dazzle them with conjuring tricks, without impressing the stamp of intensive progress on their moral and intellectual culture, but instead branding society with the marks of corruption, then Fazy would surely be great and worthy of being envied by tyrants more powerful than he.

"He is as capable as anyone of sustaining contradictory policies and from them he produces the magic formula with which, as with a compass, he steers his little ship of state. At one moment radicalism will supply the crew and ultramontanism the cargo, at another, it will be the other way about—just as it suits the book and the latest tactics of the helmsman. So the machine of state is constantly in motion, heaving from one side to the other, like the balance wheel of a watch. And with what a happy effect! The radicals swear that things are moving forwards, the ultramontanists are convinced that they are going backwards. Both views are correct; both sides are happy in their faith and the Lord God Fazy remains at the helm.

"Now, my dear friend, let these lines be enough for the moment.

"Warmest greetings from

Your Joh. Philipp Becker"

---

"Paris, July 20, 1860

"Dear R...,

"So you think that my portrait of Fazy is perhaps somewhat exaggerated. By no means, my dear friend! Moreover, one cannot just think and judge things and people according to one's whims, but only in accordance with the logic of one's understanding and inner experience. Anyone whose words differ from his thoughts in such matters, and whose acts differ from his words, is untrue to himself and a scoundrel.

"Fazy, who received his earliest education in a Herrnhut school in Neuwied and speaks good German, still gives the appearance, at the age of 65, of judging Germany and its people according to the impressions gained at that model institution. Nothing German, and even Swiss German, is to his taste, and only in rare cases does he make an exception of this. As a native of Geneva and as a man who has spent a long time in the United States of North America, he is intimately familiar with republican institutions, with the methods of agitation and, owing to his natural disposition, especially with the various stratagems of intrigue. He is more of a demagogue than a democrat and his chief political slogan, his badge: laissez aller et laissez faire, would not be so bad, if only he could refrain from having a finger in every pie in which people attempt to do something without the blessing of the state. His interventions are designed either to achieve something that adds to his own glory, or where this proves to be impossible, to frustrate the enterprise, as he did in the project of Herr Mayer and others to establish the Banque de Crédit et d'Échange and to set up a Chamber of Commerce. During the Genevan revolution of 1846 M. James acted in accordance with the precept: away from the danger zone makes for a long life, and he thought more of how to escape than of how to win. He was just on the point of leaving Geneva in secret when Albert Galeer, the heart and soul of the entire movement, made a last mighty effort to resolve the struggle which had long raged indecisively, and gained a total victory. Galeer, who was single-mindedly devoted to the cause and cared nothing for fame, firmly believed, at least at that time, that Fazy was motivated by a sincere love of the people. He was not at all put out when that hero, who had been saved from a precipitate flight in the nick of time, posed as the conqueror at a popular assembly immediately after the victory. Galeer himself could not contemplate a government post for himself immediately after the revolution, especially as he was not a Genevan, but a citizen of the Canton of Berne and so could neither vote nor be elected according to the confederate laws in force at the time. It is true that citizenship was soon conferred on him and after that he was elected into the Grand Council and was also given a post as translator of state papers. As the focus of the most energetic among the young people of Geneva he became a firm pillar of radical rule. Thanks to him Fazy's position as the hero of the great mass was strengthened still further. Using the phraseology of French radicalism which he had acquired when working on Le National in Paris in the day of Louis Philippe, James Fazy agitated in the press and on the podium, disguising his true thoughts and desires to his heart's content. Nevertheless, despite all his demagoguery a year had scarcely passed before he began to be seriously accused in various circles of entertaining secret relations with the leaders of the ultramontane party, and soon after of being a Francophile. In German Switzerland, where people look at these things more coolly and their judgments are more detached, they seem to have seen through his game even earlier. Towards the end of 1847, immediately after the conclusion of the Sonderbund War M. James Fazy went to the offices of the War Department to pay a call on General Ochsenbein; I was the only person there, as Ochsenbein was with the rest of the officers visiting the wounded in the hospitals. When Ochsenbein returned I told him that M. Fazy had called, to which he responded contemptuously: 'Oh, that perfidious hypocrite!' General Ochsenbein, the former President of the Swiss Confederation and head of the Berne Government, who for years has been living on an Imperial French pension in Switzerland, may now perhaps think more charitably of an old colleague who is certainly his equal. However, it is a noteworthy fact that M. Fazy was never elected into the Federal Council by the Swiss National Assembly, despite all the efforts of his friends and himself, and despite the tendency, so dominant in this Assembly as almost to have become an inflexible dogma, to ensure that the important cantons should be guaranteed a turn in the Central Government. He always was a recalcitrant in relation to, and when possible tried to put a spoke in the wheel of, the federal authority which provided him with no opportunity to exercise power, and instead limited the cantonal sovereignty so convenient for him.

"When, early in 1849, the Federal police deemed it politically expedient to persecute me for organising a Sicilian legion, I went to Geneva where Fazy told me that I could organise to my heart's content and had no need to concern myself about the Federal Council., I am well aware that M. Fazy will instantly sacrifice anyone as soon as things take a bad turn for the person concerned, even if the law is on that person's side, and I have later experienced this myself in an incident which is too complicated to explain in a letter but to the facts of which the Federal Commissars Dr. Kern and Trog can testify.

"As far as the refugees were concerned, he used the watchword of humanity to resist the measures of the Federal Council and with callous arbitrariness persecuted refugees who were in his bad books. Above all, outstanding people close to Galeer, in whom he suspected a future rival, were subjected to ruthless persecution. Mazzini had good cause to fear him more than the Federal police. The tall Heinzen was abhorrent to him and had to leave the Canton almost at once. 'He thumps around as if the ground belonged to him', was the only explanation Fazy naively offered. Struve was arrested while out walking with his wife, even though there had been no instructions from the Federal Council, and was pushed over the frontier to the Canton of Vaud on the grounds that he was a Russian spy. Galeer managed to get to Fazy in time and tried to rectify this error. The two became embroiled in loud discussions since Fazy believes he is more convincing the more he shouts and the more indignant he pretends to be. Struve had to remain a Russian spy. If I remember rightly this scene took place in the Hôtel des Bergues in the presence of Mr. Herzen, the Russian refugee with whom the head of the Geneva Government liked to dine. However, this gentleman certainly had no part in the sordid accusations brought against Struve. Fazy is undoubtedly a greater Russophile than Struve, for I once heard him say in a speech at some celebration: 'The works of Jean Jacques Rousseau are more read and better understood in Russia than in Germany.' It is true that his principal intention here was to snipe at Galeer's German friends and the Germans in general.

"Galeer, who up till then had gone along with Fazy through thick and thin on political matters and whom I spoke to just after he had crossed swords with Fazy on Struve's account, told me sadly: 'I am through with Fazy now. As a matter of honour I can no longer associate with him. The man is a veritable monster politically, a mere animal in his desires. If I were to remain in league with him this would mean helping to destroy the cause of the people from within. Only if he is confronted by a truly liberal party, will he be compelled to uphold the banner of radicalism to save his position. As long as he is opposed only by the old aristocracy things will only get worse, since he has long been flirting with the ultramontane party and can really do what he likes. Moreover, he is no true Swiss in his attitudes and looks more to Paris than to Berne. I have for a long time now had reason enough to turn my back on him but I was prevented by the fact that I had been accustomed to look on him as a worthy man for so long. Only repeated internal struggles and the external clash today have finally prevailed on me to settle accounts with him.'

"All the people with independent minds and especially the members of the young school of political economy gathered round Galeer, and the committed radical and socialist elements thus 'united' soon became known as the democratic party. Henceforth radicalism, with few exceptions, consisted solely in conscious or unconscious servility towards Fazy, who had now found, in the Catholic districts of Savoy united with Geneva after 1815, a lever by which to control the majority. The ultramontane priests, all-powerful in that region, now entered into an alliance with 'radicalism', which was the upshot of Fazy's activity. Galeer was subjected to the basest sort of calumny, persecuted and was finally removed from his post. The young democratic party now found itself caught between the party of the aristocrats on the one hand and the party of the united old radicals and the ultramontanists on the other, and was as yet unable to put up its own independent list at the approaching elections. And although M. James Fazy refused to include the names of some of the democrats in his own list, Galeer and his friends, scorning the offers of the aristocratic party, resolved to give their votes this time to Fazy, looking for victory to the future. So if Fazy had been sincere in what he said about progress and a radically bourgeois development he would have had no need to attach himself to the filthy wing of the eternally backward-looking ultramontanists. In order to prosecute the malicious attacks and accusations against Galeer with greater effect the satellites of His Excellency, the 'radical' President, founded a special abusive paper to relieve that astute lord and master of the necessity of befouling his own Moniteur, the Revue de Genève, with his invective, more and more of which now appeared in the paper of his whipping-boys, whom he could disown at will. Galeer, whose health was weak, succumbed to this dastardly campaign and died 'in the course of the same year (1851) when he was still no more than thirty-five years of age. How often did I not hear it said in Geneva: 'Our good, noble Galeer was the victim of the inexorable revenge of our jesuitical tyrant.' In the following elections Galeer's friends entered into the alliance offered by the aristocratic party, and they did so all the more willingly since the latter declared themselves content with the fall of Fazy and with a very modest share in the government. Galeer, who always remained true to his principles, would probably have rejected this alliance even now, but, as the members of his party said, to what end has M. Fazy given us the fine example of his alliance with the ultramontane party, why should we be ashamed of joining up with the decent wing of the aristocratic party when Fazy does not blush to be associated with the indecent wing of the ultramontanists? Can we not progress at least as far with the cultured aristocracy as M. Fazy claims to with the ignorant ultramontanists?

"When it came to the elections, then (I believe they took place in November 1853) many radicals and even a number of Fazy's ministerial colleagues went over to the democrats, so that the hero of 1846 was unseated from his presidential chair by a great majority. The ex-President, who had run up lots of debts, now found himself in an extremely embarrassing situation. In this context I must digress to reveal a number of characteristic facts about his life.

"Even before entering the government M. James Fazy had run through a substantial inheritance in fine style. Up to his ears in debts and mercilessly pursued by his creditors, he sought as soon as he had arrived at the presidential chair quickly to abolish the practice of arresting debtors. Of course, he was acting 'in the interests of personal liberty'. In 1856 I was told by a Genevan citizen plagued by debts: 'It is a good thing that we had a spendthrift as head of the government. Though he could not abolish debts, at least he abolished the debtors' prison.'

"In the beginning of the fifties, however, M. Fazy found himself in sore straits materially, so that a 'grateful people' had to come to his rescue and make him a present of a large building site that had become available with the razing of the fortifications. And why not indeed? Since he had been instrumental in cleaning this area of the fortifications, why should he not 'annex' a portion of it, especially as greater potentates than he do not disdain to do things of that sort. M. Fazy was now able to sell many large building sites and build a big beautiful house for himself. Unfortunately, he soon incurred new debts and could not pay the wages of his builders. Early in 1855 he was forced to endure being shouted at on the street by a master carpenter to whom he owed a few thousand francs: 'Pay me, you rogue, so that I can buy bread for my children.' It was in these circumstances that the hard-pressed man became an ex-President, and, to crown it all, he found himself in an even more painfully embarrassing situation. What happened was that the Caisse d'Escompte, a radical bank, was forced to suspend payments. Fazy's friends in the bank, themselves overburdened with debts, had advanced credit to him and to each other far beyond what was permitted in the statutes and was actually at the disposal of the bank. The director, who is in jail to this day, had been even less restrained—bad examples ruin good habits—in advancing credit to himself. Thus the Caisse d'Escompte found itself on the brink of a grave emergency: bankruptcy. The savings of a hundred thrifty workers' families were in jeopardy. Good counsel and, even more urgently, action were needed, cost what it might, otherwise Fazism would have been swept away by the deficit like chaff in the wind. Naturally enough in the circumstances, there could be no question of raising money for the Caisse d'Escompte directly. However, at that time there was another bank in Geneva labouring to establish itself, the Banque Générale Suisse. A considerable amount of capital had to be procured for this bank so that in return it would rescue the Caisse d'Escompte from its financial ebb and M. Fazy from the flood of debts. Fazy had to act as rescuer in order to be rescued himself. In case of success he was guaranteed a substantial commission expressed in so and so many per cent and the Caisse d'Escompte the badly needed additional capital. So on behalf of the Banque Générale Suisse and also pro domo, M. Fazy went to Paris where, after a sojourn lasting several weeks and, as rumour would have it, thanks to the gracious assistance of 'His Majesty', he succeeded in persuading the Crédit Mobilier to provide millions of francs towards the rescue operation. At around the same time (November 1855) the preparations for the new elections were being made and the sauveur therefore sent letters home to Geneva in advance, announcing that he would presently arrive bearing in person his cargo of millions. This was a healing plaster for the stricken hearts of the shareholders of the Caisse d'Escompte, and a magic wand for the ultramontane-radical voters. At that time a good likeness of him appeared in a caricature showing him as a gigantic swan entering the harbour of Geneva weighed down with sacks of gold. A joker told me at the time that according to the story he had heard over a beer Fazy had brought back 50 million, over a glass of wine the sum rose to 100 million and when the absinthe was reached it had become 200 million. In the eyes of his children, the reputation of Papa Fazy's miraculous powers was fully restored. The democrats, fondly imagining that their victory at the hustings was assured, did not exert themselves very much: A society of muscular young men that had been formed some time before—les fruitiers—now established themselves as Fazy's bodyguard. They terrorised the electorate in the most brutal manner possible and their idol ascended the presidential throne once more.

"This time, however, it soon became perfectly clear that the ultramontane faction had not lent their massive support for nothing, but that they were determined to have their share of the rewards of victory. M. Marilley, the Bishop of Fribourg, an eternal agitator and trouble-maker who had been driven out of Switzerland as a result of the Sonderbund War, left France and reappeared in Geneva one fine day with the official permission of M. Fazy. Once in Geneva he began to celebrate 'Holy' Mass once again. The entire city reverberated with anger, and popular fury soon echoed throughout Switzerland. It was too much even for the blindest radicals, the most subservient fruitiers. A popular assembly was convened without delay and the head of the government was presented with a vote of no-confidence. His colleague, Councillor Tourte, although himself merely a disciple and pupil of Fazy, suddenly displayed a very dubious desire for independence and he thundered away at his lord and master without any scruples whatever. However, M. Fazy had taken good care to absent himself from the country before the arrival of the Lord Bishop, just as he always did leaving his colleagues to drink what he had brewed. M. de Marilley, of course, had to leave the city and the country without more ado. Papa Fazy however wrote from Berne giving his unruly children a dressing down and asserting that he had been the victim of a misunderstanding, the government had not handled the affair correctly, he had merely acted in the 'interest of freedom of religion' and had simply permitted the Bishop to make a visit. After the storm had abated a much wronged Papa Fazy returned to Geneva. It was now all the simpler to re-establish his injured authority and restore faith in his pure love of freedom and of his country, by the simple device of uttering a few oracular statements which ring very true and fit any situation, because his colleagues were decent enough to shoulder the main responsibility. But Fazy had thus achieved the satisfactory end of demonstrating to his friends of the ultramontane faction that he was always prepared to do for them—whatever lay in his power. For a number of years now M. James Fazy has been a very wealthy man. Not only is the Banque Générale Suisse said to have guaranteed him a certain percentage for the duration of his life, but he has also, as head of the government, revealed great understanding of his own interests in such matters as the development of railways in his own Canton, etc. In his large and beautiful mansion (the Hôtel Fazy on the Quai du Mont Blanc) the beau monde moves among the cercle des étrangers. And ever since Piedmont found the 'gambling dens' of the Savoy spas incompatible with its political morality, the compassionate President of the Republic of Geneva has touchingly offered such a den asylum in his roomy dwelling. Long live freedom! Laissez aller et laissez faire! Allez chez moi et faites votre jeu!

"Darling, what more can you desire?

Your Johann Philipp Becker"

Leaving Vogt's patrons, I descend now to his accomplices.

Peace and goodwill to this fair meeting, I come not with hostility, but greeting.

At the head of the procession, from which I intend only to single out a few of the more striking figures, we encounter the Berlin National-Zeitung, under the command of Herr F. Zabel. A comparison between the review of the "Magnum Opus" which appeared at Vogt's prompting in the Revue contemporaine from the pen of M. Edouard Simon and the corresponding articles in the National-Zeitung, Breslauer Zeitung, etc., almost leads one to the conclusion that the "well-rounded character" issued two pro-grammes, one dealing with the Italian campaign, the other with the Augsburg campaign. What on earth could have induced Herr F. Zabel, that fat and tedious bore of the National-Zeitung, who is usually so cautious, to kick over the traces and translate Vogt's street-songs into leading articles? The first detailed reference to the National-Zeitung appeared in No. 205 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on January 26, 1849, in a leading article beginning with the words "Signpost to Schilda". However, the arms of this signpost are too long to reprint them here. In a leading article of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 224 of February 17, 1849, it is stated:

"The Berlin National-Zeitung represents triviality portentously expressed. Some recent samples. They are taken from its discussion of the Prussian circular note.... Althoughs and buts! Can and may and seem! Consider and wish that the Prussian Government may wish! Like the inmate of a bagnio each phrase has a hundredweight tied to it, and is therefore weighty. Each 'if', each 'although', each 'but' is a real Dr. utriusque juris. And if you take all that Christian-Germanic padding, all those cotton rags in which the National-Zeitung has solicitously enveloped its wisdom and unwrap them just as carefully, what remains? ... Political hot air, in black and white, Berlin leading articles en grande tenue.... The National-Zeitung is obviously written for the thinking reader, just like Rotteck's Weltgeschichte.... The French have an apt formula for thought of this kind which is active purely at a linguistic level. 'Je n'aime pas les épinards et j'en suis bien aise; car si je les aimais, j'en mangerais beaucoup, et je ne peux pas les souffrir.' 'I do not like spinach and that is a good thing; for if I liked it I would not be able to eat enough of it and I can't stand it.' ... The National-Zeitung has Prussia's happiness at heart and so it wants—another Ministry. What it wants in any case is—a Ministry. And this is the only thing which the patrons of the National-Zeitung are definite and self-confident about."

In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 296, the following can be found:

"Berlin, May 9, 1849.... It is interesting to observe the attitude of the Berlin press towards the Saxon revolution. The 'National-Zeitung' knows only one emotion: the fear of being banned"

But fear is an elixir of life, as the National-Zeitung has demonstrated throughout the decade of Manteuffel's rule. The National-Zeitung has proved the truth of Pope's dictum:

Still her old empire to restore she tries, For, born a goddess, Dullness never dies.

The only thing that distinguishes Pope's realm of Dullness from that of the National-Zeitung is that in the former "now Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first", whereas in the latter, the old dunce, Dunce the first, still holds sway. The Breslauer Zeitung, which follows hard on the heels of the National-Zeitung, is now in raptures about the Hohenzollern Ministry as it had been about the Manteuffel Ministry before it. Early in 1860 I received the following letter:

"Breslau, February 27, 1860

"Dear Marx,

"I saw in the Volks-Zeitung your address and your declaration against the National-Zeitung. An article similar to that in the National-Zeitung appeared also in the Breslauer Zeitung from the pen of its daily contributor, Dr. Stein. This is the same Dr. Stein who used to sit with D'Ester on the extreme left of the Berlin National Assembly and who proposed the famous motion against the officers of the Prussian army. This great Stein with the diminutive body was suspended from his post as teacher. When the new Ministry was installed he set himself the task of agitating on its behalf, not just in the past year, in preparation for the elections, but even now, to bring about a merger of the Silesian democrats and the constitutionalists. Despite this his application to the present Ministry for permission to give private lessons has been refused, not just once but over and over again. The previous Ministry had tacitly allowed him to teach, while the present one prohibits him from doing so on the grounds that it is unlawful. He has now gone to Berlin to obtain permission there but without success, as you can see elsewhere in the same issue of the Volks-Zeitung which printed your declaration. Dr. Stein has now made the Brimstone Gang play their part in the procession of fools in the Breslauer Ressourcen-Gesellschaft. Nevertheless, Dr. Stein, Schlehan, Semrau and their cronies have to put up with one humiliation after the other at the hands of the constitutionalists; but men of their stamp will not let themselves be deflected from their patriotic purposes. What do you say to this fine company?"

What should I say about my colleague Stein, for in fact, Stein was my colleague, since I was for a full six months, in 1855, a correspondent of the Neue Oder-Zeitung and this was the only German paper for which I wrote while I was abroad. Clearly, Stein is a man with a stony [steinern] heart and even the refusal to allow him to give private lessons could not soften him. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung hammered away at Stein a great deal in order to knock him into shape. Thus in No. 225, for example:

"Cologne, February 16, 1849.... As for Herr Stein himself, we recall the time when he attacked the republicans on fanatically constitutional grounds, when in the Schlesische Zeitung he roundly denounced the representatives of the working class and had them denounced by a schoolteacher whose ideas were akin to his own and who is now a member of the 'Association for Law and Order'. Just as pitiful as the Agreers Assembly itself was the so-called democratic group of this Assembly. It could be foreseen that these gentlemen, in order to be re-elected, would now recognise the imposed Constitution. It is even more characteristic of the standpoint of these gentlemen that after the elections they are disavowing in the democratic clubs what before the elections they assented to at meetings of the electors. This petty, crafty liberal slyness was never the diplomacy of revolutionaries."

The [Neue] Rheinische Zeitung had not sculptured this stone [Stein] in vain, as he demonstrated as soon as Manteuffel had dictated the dictated Chamber out of existence once again, for Dr. Julius Stein then proclaimed in the "chief democratic club in Breslau":

"We" (the extreme Berlin Left) "have regarded the German question as a lost cause from the outset.... People must now realise that no united Germany is possible as there are still German Princes" (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 290).

It is indeed a heart-rending sight, it is enough to melt a stone, to see how Schwerin time and time again rejects this same Stein, even though he is no longer a stumbling-block [Stein des Anstosses], and refuses to use him as—a building stone [Baustein].

I do not know if my readers have ever themselves seen a copy of Punch, the London equivalent of the Kladderadatsch. The title-page shows a picture of Punch sitting down and behind him stands his dog Toby with a grumpy expression on his face and a pen behind his ear, both of which point to his being a born penny-a-liner. If it is fair to compare small things with large then one could perhaps compare Vogt with Punch, especially since the latter has lost his wit, a misfortune that struck him in 1846 with the abolition of the Corn Laws. His companion, however, Toby the dog, can only be compared to himself or to—Eduard Meyen. And in fact if Eduard Meyen were ever really to die he would not stand in need of any Pythagorean migration of the soul. Toby has already taken care of that during his lifetime. I would not go as far as to claim that Eduard Meyen sat for the artist who designed the title vignette, but in any case I have never in my life seen a greater similarity between a man and a dog. But there is nothing surprising about this, since Eduard Meyen is a penny-a-liner by nature, and the penny-a-liner is by nature—Toby. E. Meyen has always inclined to devote his obtrusively versatile pen to ready-made party-organisation-literary-enterprise institutions. An imposed programme saves one the trouble of thinking for oneself, the feeling of togetherness with a more or less organised mass of people stifles the sense of one's own inadequacy, and the realisation that a war-chest is available can overcome, momentarily at least, even Toby's professional peevishness. Thus we find Eduard Meyen attached to the unfortunate Central Democratic Committee, that empty nut which grew out of the German Democratic Assembly in Frankfurt am Main in 1848. As an exile in London he was engaged as the most indefatigable producer of the lithographed flysheets on which a portion of the money Kinkel had raised by loan to manufacture a revolution was frittered away, a circumstance which did not of course prevent the selfsame Eduard Meyen from rushing with bag and baggage into the camp of the Prince Regent to beg for an amnesty and in fact to obtain permission to go to Wandsbek and pester the Hamburg Preischütz with articles on foreign policy. Vogt, who was busy enlisting the services of "people who" would "follow his Programme" and were prepared to bring him articles, and who was dangling the tempting sight of a well-filled war-chest before their eyes, came as a godsend to Eduard Meyen, who was running around without a master just then, for no one was willing to pay the dog tax during those hard times. And you can just imagine the howls of rage when Toby heard a rumour that I was about to cheat Vogt's party literary-enterprise institution of its credit and its pen-pushing pugs of their fees! Quelle horreur! Vogt's instructions to his Eduard Meyen about the obligatory treatment of the "Magnum Opus" were just as detailed as those given to Edouard Simon, and in fact Eduard Meyen did adorn 5 numbers of Der Freischütz (Nos. 17-21, 1860) with pieces from the "Magnum Opus''. But what a difference! Whereas Edouard Simon corrected the original, Eduard Meyen bowdlerised it. The simplest evidence of the objective understanding of a given topic is surely the ability to copy printed matter, but our Eduard Meyen is utterly incapable of copying even a single line correctly. Toby's mind lacks even the strength requisite for correct copying. Just listen:

Der Freischütz, No. 17:

"The paper" (Allgemeine Zeitung) "... has now been found guilty ... also ... of having made use of the assistance of a revolutionary party which Vogt has stigmatised as the Brimstone Gang of the German republicans."

When and where has Vogt prated about the Brimstone Gang of the German republicans? Der Freischütz, No. 18:

"It is Liebknecht who has launched an attack on Vogt in the Allgemeine Zeitung, by repeating there the accusations made by Biscamp in the London Volk. However, the accusations did not develop their full force until Marx sent to the offices of the Allgemeine Zeitung a pamphlet that had appeared in London and which he attributed to Blind."

Vogt was able to tell many lies but even his lawyer, Hermann, forbade him the lie that the article by Biscamp, which had not been reprinted in the Allgemeine Zeitung, was "repeated" there by Liebknecht. Nor has Vogt ever thought of maintaining that it was I who sent the pamphlet Zur Warnung to the Allgemeine Zeitung. On the contrary, he says quite explicitly: "It was Herr Liebknecht ... who sent the libellous pamphlet to the Allgemeine Zeitung" ("Magnum Opus" p. 167). Der Freischütz, No. 19:

"Blind positively denied that he was the pamphlet's author, and the printer certified that it was not given to him to print by Blind. What is however certain is that the lampoon was immediately taken over in the same type-setting in Das Volk, and that Marx caused it to be published in the Allgemeine Zeitung, etc."

In his "Magnum Opus" Vogt on the one hand prints Fidelio Hollinger's declaration asserting that the pamphlet had not been set in his print-shop, and, on the other, my counter-declaration that the original type of the lampoon was still standing at Hollinger's when it was reprinted in Das Volk. What chaos did our unfortunate Toby make out of this! Der Freischütz, No. 19:

"As far as the people themselves are concerned" (Engels and I are supposed to say in Techow's letter) "they are pure rationalists who have no patience with nationality."

No sentimentality, my dear Toby; no sentimentality, writes Techow, according to Vogt. Der Freischütz, No. 20:

"Marx ... did not prevent the duellists from going to Ostend to fight a pistol duel. Techow acted as Willich's second, etc. After this incident [...] Techow broke off relations with Marx and his League."

Eduard Meyen is not content to substitute Ostend for Antwerp. He had probably heard about the Frenchman in the West End of London complaining that the English write "London" and pronounce it "Constantinople". Techow, who had only met me once in his life at the time of his correspondence and who moreover writes explicitly that he had at first intended to join me and my League, is made by Eduard Meyen to break off relations with me and my League, of which he was never a member. Der Freischütz, No. 21:

"This incident" (the Joint Workers' Festival in Lausanne) "explains the violent attack on Vogt which was made in Das Volk in London."

In the "Magnum Opus" Vogt himself gives the date of the "violent attack" on him in Das Volk—May 14, 1859. (The pamphlet appeared in Das Volk on June 18, 1859.) However, the Lausanne Joint Festival took place on June 26 and 27, 1859, i.e. long after the "violent attack" which according to Meyen it provoked. But we have quoted enough of Toby's reading. It is not surprising that Toby having managed to read all sorts of things in Vogt that were not there should also have made this discovery:

"Vogt's book will take its rightful place among the boldest, wittiest and most useful polemics in our literature" (Der Freischütz, No. 17).

Just think of this wretched Toby, incapable as he is of even copying out two lines of a printed book correctly, just think of him condemned to sit in Wandsbek, having to decipher the book of world history every day, straining to read a record of events barely hinted at in the obscurest of scripts, copying away by the hour and having to produce life-size photographs of the dissolving views of the present in the columns of Der Freischütz! Unhappy Wandsbek Messenger! Happy Hamburg reader of Der Freischütz!

A few days ago the London Times published a strange news item which went through the entire English press and bore the title: "A Man Shot by a Dog." It seems therefore that Toby knows how to use a gun and thus it is not surprising to find Eduard Meyen sing in Der Freischütz: "A marksman am I in the pay of the Regent.

The Kölnische Zeitung confined itself to a few malicious little paragraphs and insinuations in favour of Vogt. A week after the "Magnum Opus" had appeared it spread the fairy-tale in its columns that it was already out-of-print, probably so as not to have to lay violent hands upon it. But what an irony of history!

If only I had been able to foresee in 1848-49, at the time of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, when we had daily to cross swords with our Cologne neighbour for the Poles, Hungarians and Italians, that this very same Kölnische Zeitung would in 1859 become the chivalrous protagonist of the principle of nationality, and that the simple Herr Jusepp Dumont would emerge from his chrysalis as Signor Giuseppe Del Monte! But of course at that time no Louis Bonaparte had as yet given the nationalities the superior - blessing of morality and liberalism, and the Kölnische Zeitung will always remember that Louis Bonaparte has saved society. The red fury with which it attacked Austria at the time can be seen from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 144:

"Cologne, November 15 (1848). At a moment when the whole of Germany cries out in indignation because the blood-stained minion of the Austrian bandit, because a Windischgrätz could dare to have the deputy Robert Blum shot down like a dog—at such a moment it is fitting to take note of two German papers of which one has attempted with almost unheard-of perfidy to vilify the last few days of the dead man's life, while the other pursues him to the grave with its insipid cretinism. We are referring to the Kölnische Zeitung and the Rheinische Volks-Halle (vulgo Narrhalla).... In No. 292 the Kölnische Zeitung reported: 'On the 22nd of this month' (October) 'the enthusiastic leaders of the democratic party ... left Vienna; so did ... Robert Blum.' The Kölnische Zeitung made this statement without any qualification, but set its denunciation of Blum in Garamond type to print it more firmly on the reader's memory. The Kölnische Zeitung reached the heights of perfection in its subsequent issues. It was not ashamed to find space in its columns even for the articles of the most black and yellow paper of the camarilla, news items from the journal of the Archduchess Sophie [...], the most infamous of all Austrian papers [...] " (there then follows a quotation including this passage): "'Robert Blum earned no laurels in Vienna.... For he spoke in the great hall of the internal enemies—timorousness, lack of courage and of stamina; but if there were to arise other enemies in addition to these internal ones—he hoped this would not be the case—but if there were still people in the city who preferred the victory of the military to the victory of freedom, then the life-and-death battle waged before the walls of the city must be just as ruthlessly waged against them too.... In Herr Blum's speech there lay the madness of a Septembrist .... If Herr Blum really spoke those words then we must say quite frankly that he has dishonoured himself.' So much for the Kölnische Zeitung."

By means of an ingenious system of concealed plumbing, all the lavatories of London empty their physical refuse into the Thames. In the same way every day the capital of the world spews out all its social refuse through a system of goose quills, and it pours out into a great central paper cloaca—the Daily Telegraph. Liebig rightly criticises the senseless wastefulness which robs the Thames of its purity and the English soil of its manure. Levy, however, the proprietor of this central paper cloaca, is an expert not only in chemistry, but even in alchemy. Having transformed the social refuse of London into newspaper articles, he transforms the newspaper articles into copper, and finally the copper into gold. At the entrance which leads to the central paper cloaca, the following words are written di colore oscuro: "hic ... quisquam faxit oletum!" or as Byron translated it so poetically "Wanderer, stop and—piss!"

Levy, like Habakkuk, est capable de tout. He is capable of printing a leading article three columns long on a single case of rape. Earlier this year he treated his numerous public of gourmets to an asafoetida stew that had been ingeniously brewed from ingredients of a certain court case that were so nauseating that the judge ordered the court to be cleared of women and children. Unfortunately Levy had spiced the stew with the name of an innocent person. The resulting libel action brought against Levy ended with his conviction and the public condemnation of his newspaper by the English judiciary. As everyone knows, libel actions, like all other actions, are shamelessly expensive in England; they are in a sense the privilege of the coffre fort. However, a number of unemployed lawyers in the City now discovered that Levy was fair game; they joined forces and offered their services gratis as a speculation to anyone who wished to take action against Levy for libel. Levy himself thereupon complained loudly in his paper that a new kind of blackmail had become fashionable: libel actions against Levy. Since then it has become precarious to sue Levy. One lays oneself open to ambiguous talk, for just as you can read on walls in London the notice: Commit no Nuisance, so too you can find written on the entrances to the English courts: Commit Levy.

Politicians refer to the Daily Telegraph as "Palmerston's mobpaper", but Levy's refuse barge only carries politics as ballast. The Saturday Review aptly described his penny-rag as "cheap and nasty".

"It is a fatal symptom," it says inter alia, "that it should have given such a definite preference for dirt to cleanliness. In every case it will exclude the most important report in order to leave space for a disreputable article."

Nevertheless, Levy also has a prudery of his own. He criticises immorality in the theatre, for instance, and like a second Cato the Censor, he pursues the dress of the ballet dancers, which according to him starts too late and ends too soon. Such fits of virtue only take Levy out of the frying-pan into the fire. 0 Logic! a London theatrical journal, The Players, exclaims, 0 Logic! where is thy blush? How the rogue must have laughed in his sleeve!... The Telegraph as guardian of the decency of female costume on the stage! Holy Jupiter, what will happen next? Earthquakes and fiery comets are the least that can be expected now. Decency! "I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word." And as Hamlet advises Ophelia, the "Player" advises Levy to clear off to a nunnery: "Get thee to a nunnery, Levy!" Levy in a nunnery! And perhaps "nunnery" is just a printing error for a nonaria so that we should really read it "Get thee to a nonaria, Levy!" and in that case, everyone will be

"multum gaudere paratus, Si Cynico" (the cynic Levy) "barbam petulans nonaria vellat".

The Weekly Mail maintains that although Levy really fools no one, he has changed "i" into "y", and it is true that among the 22,000 Levites whom Moses counted in the journey through the wilderness, there was not a single Levi who spelled his name with a "y". Just as Edouard Simon spares no effort to be regarded as belonging to the Romance people, so Levy is determined to be an Anglo-Saxon. Therefore, at least once a month he attacks the un-English policies of Mr. Disraeli, for Disraeli, "the Asiatic mystery", is, unlike the Telegraph, not an Anglo-Saxon by descent. But what does it profit Levy to attack Mr. D'Israeli and to change "i" into "y", when Mother Nature has inscribed his origins in the clearest possible way right in the middle of his face. The, nose of the mysterious stranger of Slawkenbergius (see Tristram Shandy) who had got the finest nose from the promontory of noses was just a nine days' wonder in Strasbourg, whereas Levy's nose provides conversation throughout the year in the City of London. A Greek epigrammatist describes the nose of a certain Castor which could be used for all sorts of things: as a shovel, a trumpet, a sickle, an anchor, etc. He concludes his description with the words:

"Ουτως ευχρηστον σχευους Καστωρ τετυχηχε, Ρινα φερων πασης αρμενον εργασιας"

But even Castor could not have guessed the purpose to which Levy puts his nose. The English poet comes nearer to it in the lines:

"And 'tis a miracle we may suppose, No nastiness offends his skilful nose."

Indeed the great skill of Levy's nose consists in its ability to titillate with a rotten smell, to sniff it out a hundred miles away and. to attract it. Thus Levy's nose serves the Daily Telegraph as elephant's trunk, antenna, lighthouse and telegraph. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Levy writes his paper with his nose. The clean-minded Daily Telegraph was of course the only English paper in which Vogt's Lousiad, not only could, but had to be printed. In Levy's organ an article two-and-a-half columns long appeared on February 6, 1860, with the title: "The Journalistic Auxiliaries of Austria", which was in fact a mere translation into malodorous English of the two leading articles from the Berlin National-Zeitung. To lead the reader astray, the article bore the superscription: "From an occasional correspondent, Frankfort on the Main, February 2."I knew of course that the only correspondent of the Telegraph was based in Berlin where Levy's nose had sniffed him out with its customary virtuosity. I therefore wrote at once to a friend in Berlin asking him to see if he could discover the name of Levy's correspondent. My friend, a man whose learning has been acknowledged even by Alexander von Humboldt, was obdurate enough to insist that there was no Daily Telegraph in London and consequently no correspondent belonging to it in Berlin. I therefore turned to another acquaintance in the City on the Spree. Reply: the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Telegraph exists and is called—Abel. I thought this might well conceal a gross mystification. Abel was obviously just an abbreviation of Zabel. Nor was I led astray by the fact that Zabel cannot write English. If Abel can edit the National-Zeitung as Zabel without knowing any German, why should not Zabel be able to contribute to the Telegraph as Abel without knowing any English. So Zabel, Abel, Abel, Zabel? How to find a way out of this Babel? I examined the Berlin organ of wisdom once again, comparing it with Levy's, and this time I discovered the following passage in No. 41 of the National-Zeitung:

"Liebknecht strangely enough adds: 'We asked the magistrate (?) to authenticate our signatures.'"

This passage about the magistrate and Zabel's astonished question mark after the word "magistrate" puts one in mind of the Swabian who "as soon as he got off the ship in Asia asked: 'Isn't there some good fellow from Bebbingen here?'" Levy's paper omits not only the entire passage, but even the question mark, which proves conclusively that Levy's correspondent does not share F. Zabel's belief that London police-court judges or magistrates are the same thing as the Berlin Magistrat. Hence Zabel was not Abel and Abel was not Zabel. In the meantime, however, other acquaintances in Berlin had heard of my difficulties. One of them wrote: "Among the 22,000 Levites in Numbers there is an Abel, but it is spelt Abigail." Another wrote: "On this occasion it is Abel who killed Cain, not Cain who killed Abel." In this way I went deeper and deeper into the maze until, finally, the editor of a London newspaper assured me with the dry earnestness of the English that Abel was not a joke, but a Jewish-born man of letters in Berlin whose full name was Dr. Karl Abel. This noble youth had served for a considerable time under Stahl and Gerlach as a zealous drudge for the Kreuz-Zeitung, but with the change of Ministry he had changed, if not his skin, at least his colours. The over-eager zeal of the renegade would indeed explain why Levy's Berlin correspondent imagines that the freedom of the press in England has been specially designed to allow him to peddle his compulsive admiration of the Hohenzollern Ministry. Hypothetically, then, we may assume that there is an Abel in Berlin as well as a Levy in London—par nobile fratrum. Abel supplies his Levy simultaneously from everywhere under the sun: from Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt am Main, Stockholm, Petersburg, Hong Kong, etc.,—a much greater achievement than De Maistre's Voyage autour de ma chambre. But whatever address Abel chooses when he writes to his Levy, his dominant sign of the Zodiac remains constant: Cancer. In contrast to the procession in Echternach where those taking part move two steps forward and one step back, Abel's articles take one step forward and two steps back.

"No crab more active in the dirty dance, Downward to climb, and backward to advance." (Pope)

Abel has an undeniable talent for providing his Levy with the state secrets of the Continent. For example, if the Kölnische Zeitung publishes a leading article it has borrowed from the Baltische Monatsschrift on the state of the Russian finances, Abel will let a month go by and will suddenly send the Kölnische Zeitung's article to London from Petersburg, not omitting to hint of course that he acquired the statistical secrets entre deux cigares, not indeed from the Tsar himself, or even from the Russian Minister of Finance, but assuredly from one of the directors of the State Bank. And he will declare triumphantly: "I am in a position to state, etc." Or the official Preussische Zeitung puts out a ministerial feeler, for instance indicating Herr von Schleinitz's unauthoritative ideas about the problem of the Electorate of Hesse. This time Abel wastes no time. The very same day he writes to his Levy openly from Berlin about the problem of the Electorate of Hesse. A week later he reports: The Preussische Zeitung, the organ of the Ministry, has printed the following article on the problem of the Electorate of Hesse and "I owe it to myself" to point out that a week ago I myself, etc. Or he translates an article from the Allgemeine Zeitung, and gives it a date-line perhaps from Stockholm. This is inevitably followed by the phrase, "I must warn your readers" to beware—not of the article he has copied, but of some other article in the Allgemeine Zeitung that he has not copied. Yet, whenever he happens to mention the Kreuz-Zeitung he makes the sign of the cross so as to disguise his true identity.

As to Abel's style, we can give the reader an idea of what it is like by saying that it is a poor imitation of the styles of Stern Gescheidt, Isidor Berlinerblau and Jacob Wiesenriesler.

With Abel's permission we shall make a digression at this point. The original Stern Gescheidt is another accomplice of Vogt. He is a certain L. Bamberger who in 1848 was the editor of a provincial rag in Mainz and is at present a loup-garou married "on full pay" in Paris and a Decembrist democrat "in the simplest meaning of the word". To grasp the significance of this "simple" meaning, it is necessary to be acquainted with the jargon of the Paris Stock Exchange synagogue. Stern Gescheidt's "simple" democracy is identical with what Isaac Péreire calls "la démocratisation du crédit", the democratisation of credit. This consists in transforming the entire nation, and not just certain strata in it, into a gambling den so that the people can be swindled en masse. Under Louis Philippe the oligarchic Stock Exchange wolf had been so strait-laced that he confined his depredations to the national wealth accumulated by the upper bourgeoisie; under the aegis of Louis Bonaparte, however, all is fair gamefor the democratic Stock Exchange wolf, who like the Roman Emperor exclaims: non olet, adding with Stern Gescheidt Bamberger: "It's the quantity that does it." This is Stern Gescheidt's democracy in its extreme "simplicity". More recently, Stern Gescheidt Bamberger has come to be known under the name of "Hurrah, on to Italy!" In contrast to that, during the campaign for the Imperial Constitution he answered to the name of "Ouch, away from Kirchheimboland!" I have in my possession a priceless manuscript describing the heroic deeds of Stern Gescheidt Bamberger, who absconded from Kirchheimboland and led the volunteer corps of the Rhine Palatinate by the nose. He was much too smart not to have sensed that the bloated, blood-streaked soil of December was gold-bearing for smart treasure-seekers. So he went to Paris where, as his friend Isidor Berlinerblau alias H. B. Oppenheim puts it so aptly, "one feels freer than one knows". Stern Gescheidt, whose "circulation was coming to a standstill" in 1858 (see the declaration of the Banque de France on circulation in 1858-59), was overjoyed when he suddenly saw the dirty soil of December glistening with the bright colours of high-faluting ideas. Stern Gescheidt, as smart as he is brightly democratic, realised that if Paris had a flood which were to wash over the soil of December, it would sweep away the Credit in his ledger, while leaving the Debit behind. It is common knowledge that Stern Gescheidt Bamberger has added a tenth, Hebrew, muse to the nine Greek ones: it is "the muse of time", as he calls the Stock Exchange list.

But to return to Abel. Abel's style is saturated with the odor specifices inseparable from the Daily Telegraph, the paper cloaca of the capital of the world. When Levy finds himself genuinely moved by the scent of Abel's news reports, Abel's learning and the energy and zeal with which Abel writes from 20 different latitudes at the same time—at such moments of the greatest exaltation Levy has a very special term of endearment for Abel: he calls him his "industrious bug".

Poetic justice demands that at the end of the comedy the "well-rounded character" should not get stuck together with Abel in the London muck, but who is to pull him out of it? Who is to be his saviour? A mudlark is to be his saviour, namely Baron von Vincke, a squire of - the red earth, a knight of the joyful countenance, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.

As already mentioned, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as early as 1848 revealed the identity of the opposites Vogt and Vincke , and Vogt himself had a presentiment of this identity as early as 1859 when he wrote in his Studien:

"Herr von Vincke as the apostle of a new political freedom ... really verges on the realm of the ridiculous" (loc. cit., p. 21),

i.e. Vogt's own realm. However, on March 1, 1860 Vincke publicly extended the hand of friendship in a speech in which, as Johann Philipp Becker expressed it, he "used the Brimstone Gang as an illustration of the modest Prussian Chamber". Hardly a year had passed since he had recommended to that same house the pamphlet Po and Rhine whose sulphurous origins he had of course been unable to detect, since he lacked Levy's nose. When moreover Vincke began to play the Italian just like Vogt, when Vincke, like Vogt, insulted the Poles and when Vincke, like Vogt, proclaimed the partition of Germany, the feuding brothers fell into each other's arms for ever.

It is well known that like poles are bound to repel each other. So for a long time Vogt and Vincke repelled each other. Both men drivel too much so that each imagined that the other wished to prevent him from speaking.

Vogt is a great zoologist, as Ranickel testifies, and so is Vincke, as is demonstrated by his pig-farm at Ickern.

In Spanish drama there are always two clowns per hero. Calderón equips even St. Cyprian, the Spanish Faust, with a Moscon and a Clarin. In the same way, in the Frankfurt Parliament, the reactionary General von Radowitz had two comic adjutants, his harlequin Lichnowski and his clown Vincke. Vogt, however, the liberal counter-clown, had to do everything on his own, for Jacobus Venedey only knew how to act the sentimental role of Pantalone, and so inevitably, he came to resent Vincke. Vincke liked occasionally to take off the fool's cap and bells. On June 21, 1848, for example, he declared in Parliament:

"He sometimes imagined that he was in a theatre rather than in such an assembly."

And at a party of the Tories of the Frankfurt Parliament he made an appearance as the Prince of Fools, sat on a barrel and sang:

"The Prince of Fools am I

I'll booze until I die."

This too offended his counterpart. Furthermore, Vogt and Vincke could not intimidate each other so they both imagined that their best course was for each to set upon the other. Falstaff Vogt knew what to think of the knight without fear or reproach, and vice versa. The Westphalian Bayard had in his time studied law at German universities, not so much the Roman corpus juris for, as he said, his ancestors of the red earth had not defeated Varus for nothing. To make up for it he threw himself on Teutonic law, i.e. the students' code of behaviour, whose basis he thoroughly explored in every direction and subsequently made notorious as the legal basis. As a result of this profound and casuistical research into the students' code of behaviour he later on, whenever faced with a duel, always found some Duns-Scotian hair which at the decisive moment interposed itself as hair-splittingly sharply between our knight and the shedding of blood as the naked sword in the bridal bed which separated the princess from the locum tenens. From the adventure with the Supreme Court advocate Benda at the time of the United Diet of 1847 to the no less notorious adventure with the Prussian Minister of War in the Chamber of Deputies in 1860, this hair-splitting always intervened with the regularity of a recurrent fever. We can see how unfair was the reproach, recently levelled at the squire, that he had lost his legal basis. It is not his fault if his legal basis consists entirely of trapdoors. Moreover, since the students' code of behaviour is really only applicable in the higher reaches of legal debate, the ingenious squire replaces it at the ordinary parliamentary level by the code of the cudgels. In the frog-pond of Frankfurt Vincke once bitterly referred to his counterpart Vogt as the "Minister of the Future" But it really struck home when he heard in Ickern that Vogt, mindful of the maxim

"Once a position of power you've found, You're lord and master the whole year round",

had not only become Imperial Regent, but even Minister of Foreign Affairs in partibus, and he grumbled irritably that the rights of seniority had been ignored. For as early as the United Diet of 1847 Vincke as a frondeur had been against the Ministry and as a representative of the nobility against the bourgeois opposition. Hence on the outbreak of the March revolution he thought that he above all others was predestined to save the crown. But his rivals became Ministers of the Present, whereas he was appointed "Minister of the Future", a post that he has filled with unbroken success to this day.

In revenge he shook the dust of Berlin from his feet and went to St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt, where he joined the extreme Right wing, acting as a clown, claqueur and bully for General Radowitz.

Our finch was a fanatical and zealous Austrian as long as this had the approval of the authorities. He thundered frantically against the nationalities.

"On the left they are infatuated with every conceivable nationality in turn—Italians, Poles, and now even Magyars" (session of October 23, 1848).

The three knights Vincke, Lichnowski and Arnim played musical trio:

"To ox's bellow and cow's fart

The ass provides the underpart."

They performed this with such virtuosity in opposition to those who spoke in support of Poland (session of June 5, 1848) that even the President's bell ran out of breath, and when Radowitz went so far as to put forward military and "natural" arguments in favour of incorporating the Mincio into the German Empire (session of August 12, 1848), Vincke stood on his head and signalled his applause with his legs, to the delight of the whole gallery and the secret admiration of Vogt. As the chief claqueur for the resolutions by means of which the Frankfurt frog-pond stamped the dynastic subjugation of Poland, Hungary and Italy with the approval of the German people, the squire of the red earth shouted even more excitedly when the claims of the German nation had to be sacrificed because of the humiliating armistice of Malmö. To secure a majority for the ratification of the cease-fire, diplomatic and other observers sneaked down from the gallery and joined the Right-wing benches. The fraud was discovered and Raveaux pressed for a new vote. The finch protested that it was not a matter of who voted but of what was voted for (session of September 16, 1848). During the September rising in Frankfurt that had been provoked by the resolution approving the Malmö armistice the Westphalian Bayard vanished without a trace, but reappeared after the state of siege had been proclaimed and avenged himself in a series of reactionary somersaults for the fright which no one could ever make up to him. Not content with his verbal fulminations against Poles, Italians and Hungarians, he proposed that the Archduke John of Austria should be made president of the provisional central authority (session of June 21, 1848), but he obsequiously added the rider that the Habsburg executive of the German Parliament should neither implement nor proclaim, nor in any way concern itself with the Parliament's plebeian resolutions. He even fell into a rage when, just to make a change, his colleagues in the majority voted that the Imperial Administrator should at least graciously deign to secure the previous agreement of the Parliament on matters of war and peace or the conclusion of treaties with foreign powers (session of June 27, 1848). And the extreme heat which the finch generated in his noisy efforts to extort from the German Parliament a vote of confidence for the Imperial Minister Schmerling and his associates by way of reward for their and the Imperial Administrator's complicity in the bloody and infamous betrayal of Vienna (session of October 23, 1848), triumphantly refuted Fischart's slanderous words:

"Oh, what cold mouths Are Westphalian mouths!"

Thus Vincke was amiably pro-Habsburg until the Fata Morgana of Little Germanysuddenly came into view, looming above the parliamentary Sahara, and the squire perceived a life-size ministerial portfolio with a finch under its arm. Since the walls of St. Paul's Church had unusually long ears, he might well flatter himself that the noise he had made in Frankfurt with his outbursts about loyalty to the Hohenzollern dynasty had produced an agreeable effect in Berlin. Had he not declared before a crowded St. Paul's Church on June 21, 1848:

"I have been sent here by the electorate to defend the rights not only of the people, but also of the princes. I always comfort myself with the saying of the Great Electorwho once described the inhabitants of the Mark as his most loyal and obedient subjects. And we in the Mark are proud of it."

And our Bayard from the Mark proceeded from phrases to fisticuffs in the celebrated parliamentary battle in which he won his spurs (sessions of August 7 and 8, 1848). What happened was that when Brentano, in the course of the debate on the proposed amnesty for Friedrich Hecker, let fall an ambiguous reference to one of the Hohenzollern princes from the rostrum, the finch had a veritable attack of loyalty rabies and rushing from his seat he hurled himself upon Herr Brentano and tried to drag him from the rostrum, shouting "Come down, you dirty dog!" Brentano was not to be dislodged. Later on the squire assaulted him a second time and threw down the gauntlet of knighthood, though naturally he reserved the right to later and more mature reflections on scruples arising from the legal basis. Brentano accepted his challenge with the words:

"Outside the church you may say whatever you wish to me; but if you do not let go of me here I shall hit you in the face."

The squire then reached into his quiver of invective and showered the Left with a series of dirty dogs until Reichardt shouted at him: "Von Vincke, you are a skunk" (session of August 7, 1848). The finch tried to cut short the debate on the disagreement between the Brandenburg Ministry and the Berlin Agreers Assembly by simply proposing that the Assembly should proceed to the next item on the agenda.

"Ever since Wrangel's triumphant entry into Berlin," he said, "order had reigned, stocks have risen on the Exchange.... The Berlin Assembly has no right to issue proclamations to the people, etc."

The members of the Agreers Assembly had hardly been dispersed before our knight without fear or reproach fell upon them with even greater fury.

"We lack the political experience," he lamented in the session of December 12, 1848, "needed for a republic. This has been proved to us by the members of the former Berlin Assembly who approved resolutions dictated by base personal ambitions."

He sought to appease the storm this provoked by declaring that

"he was ready to defend his words against anyone, in a chivalrous manner", but, the cautious knight added, "he was not referring to any member of this Assembly, only the members of the dispersed Berlin Assembly".

This was the defiant challenge that our Bayard of the Mark hurled at the entire army of dispersed Agreers. One of them heard his call, pulled himself together and succeeded in bringing about an unheard-of event: he managed to induce our squire of the red earth to venture bodily onto the battlefield at Eisenach. Bloodshed seemed inevitable when, at the decisive moment, our Bayard smelled a Duns-Scotian rat. His opponent bore the name of Georg Jung and while the laws of honour enjoined the knight without fear or reproach to do battle with dragons, they would not allow him under any circumstances to take up the cudgels with a namesake of the dragon killer. The finch simply could not be made to give up this idée fixe. He swore by all that is holy that he would rather slit his stomach like a Japanese daimio than touch a hair of the head belonging to a man with the name of Georg, especially if he was below duelling age. The knight invulnerable to duels showed all the less restraint in his onslaughts in St. Paul's Church against Temme and other persons unpalatable to the government who were safely under lock and key in the gaol at Münster (session of January 9, 1849). While he scorned no detail that might ingratiate him in high places his zeal to prove his loyalty surpassed itself in his titanic efforts to bring about the creation of a lesser Germany and a greater crown for Prussia. Warwick the King-Maker was a child compared to Vincke the Emperor-Maker.

Our Bayard from the Mark now imagined that he had heaped enough burning coals on the heads of the ingrates of March 1848. When the Ministry of Action fell, Vincke vanished for a time from St. Paul's Church and held himself in readiness. He did likewise on the fall of the von Pfuel Ministry. But as the mountain still failed to come to Mahomet, Mahomet resolved to go to the mountain. Having been elected in the first available rotten borough, the knight of the red earth suddenly reappeared in Berlin as a deputy in the imposed Chamber, fully expectant that the reward for his deeds in Frankfurt would now be forthcoming. Moreover, the knight felt entirely at home in the state of siege which would not deny him any unparliamentary freedom. He lapped up the hisses and jeers with which the people of Berlin greeted him as he stood with the other "imposed" deputies in front of the palace, waiting to be admitted to the White Hall, all the more eagerly as Manteuffel had dropped a delicate hint to the effect that they were inclined in the very highest places to accept the gift of the lesser German crown from the hands of the Emperor-Makers of Frankfurt if only to find a vacant ministerial portfolio in payment for a certain service. Full of such sweet dreams the finch sought to make himself useful for the time being by acting as the dirty boy of the Cabinet. He drew up a draft address to the Crown on lines laid down by the Kreuz-Zeitung, inveighed against amnesty, and was only willing to accept the imposed Constitution on the express condition that it would be revised and revoked by a "strong state power". He insulted the Left-wing deputies suffering from the rigours of the state of siege, etc., and patiently awaited the hour of his triumph.

The catastrophe drew nearer, the Frankfurt deputation bringing the offer of the Imperial Crown had arrived in Berlin and on April 2 (1849) Vincke put forward the most loyal amendment to the proposals about the Emperor, an amendment for which Manteuffel voted in all innocence. As soon as the session was over Vincke rushed into a neighbouring second-hand shop where he personally purchased a portfolio, a portfolio of black card-board, with a red velvet cover edged in gold. The following day our knight of the joyous countenance sat contentedly in his seat in the middle of the Chamber, grinning like a triumphant faun—but the words he heard from Manteuffel's mocking lips were "never, never, never"; and the fearless squire, the colour drained from his cheeks, and quivering like an electric eel with emotion, gasped to his friends: "Hold me back, or I shall do something terrible." The Kreuz-Zeitung, whose prescriptions Vincke had been anxiously following for months and to whose proposed address of the Chamber he had stood godfather, the Kreuz-Zeitung, to hold him back, published an article on the following day with the headline "The Nation in Danger" in which it declared inter alia:

"The Ministry remains and the King's answer to Herr von Vincke and his associates is that they should not involve themselves in matters which do not concern them."

Finding himself cheated our knight sans peur et sans reproche left Berlin for Ickern with a nose longer than Levy had ever had, a nose, moreover, which simply could not have been fobbed off onto anyone except a—Minister of the Future!

Having spent many a long anxious year vegetating in the pursuit of practical zoology in Ickern, our Cincinnatus of the red earth awoke one fine day in Berlin to find himself the official leader of the opposition in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies. Having had such ill luck with his rightist speeches in Frankfurt he now embarked on left-handed speeches in Berlin. It was not possible to discover whether he represented the opposition of confidence or the confidence of the opposition. But however that may be, he once again overplayed his hand. He soon became so indispensable to the Cabinet on the opposition benches that he was forbidden ever to take his leave of them. The squire of the red earth thus remained—a Minister of the Future.

In the circumstances the finch became tired of the whole business and so he concluded his famous Treaty of Ickern. Vogt gave it him in black and white: as soon as Plon-Plon had conquered the first parliamentarian island of Barataria on the German continent, and as soon as he had peopled it with Sch-Oppenheimers and had installed his Falstaff as its Regent, Vogt would appoint the Westphalian Bayard to be his Prime Minister and confer on him the right to adjudicate in all matters concerning duelling. Furthermore, he would make him Real and Privy General Masterbuilder in charge of all the roads, and would moreover raise him to a princely rank giving him the title of a Prince of Fools. Lastly, he would have a coin struck in the metal that passes for money in the insular realm of Vogt and this coin would have engraved on it a pair of Siamese twins, with Vogt on the right as Plon-Plon's Regent, Vincke on the left as Vogt's Minister, and a vine-adorned inscription wound round the voluminous double-figure, stating

"Cheek by jowl with you I throw down this challenge to the age."