very_ favorable circumstances, capable of a momentary
resurrection, when this last hope was taken from them, just as it was
taken from their colleagues of the "pure Democracy" in France by the
_coup d'etat_ of Louis Bonaparte.

The defeat of the south-west German insurrection, and the dispersion
of the German Parliament, bring the history of the first German
insurrection to a close. We have now to cast a parting glance upon the
victorious members of the counter-revolutionary alliance; we shall do
this in our next letter.[10]

LONDON, September 24, 1852.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] After repeated search I have been unable to find the "next
letter" referred to in the above paragraph; and, if it was ever
written, there seems no doubt it was never published.--E. M. A.

XX.

THE LATE TRIAL AT COLOGNE.

DECEMBER 22, 1852.

You will have ere this received by the European papers numerous
reports of the Communist Monster Trial at Cologne, Prussia, and of its
result. But as none of the reports is anything like a faithful
statement of the facts, and as these facts throw a glaring light upon
the political means by which the continent of Europe is kept in
bondage, I consider it necessary to revert to this trial.

The Communist or Proletarian party, as well as other parties, had
lost, by suppression of the rights of association and meeting, the
means of giving to itself a legal organization on the Continent. Its
leaders, besides, had been exiled from their countries. But no
political party can exist without an organization; and that
organization which both the Liberal bourgeois and the Democratic
shopkeeping class were enabled more or less to supply by the social
station, advantages, and long-established, every-day intercourse of
their members, the proletarian class, without such social station and
pecuniary means, was necessarily compelled to seek in secret
association. Hence, both in France and Germany, sprung up those
numerous secret Societies which have, ever since 1849, one after
another, been discovered by the police, and prosecuted as
conspiracies; but if many of them were really conspiracies, formed
with the actual intention of upsetting the Government for the time
being,--and he is a coward that under certain circumstances would not
conspire, just as he is a fool who, under other circumstances, would
do so;--there were some other Societies which were formed with a wider
an