he French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to
express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of
having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing not true
requirements but the requirements of truth, not the interests of the
proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who
belongs to no class, has no reality, and exists only in the misty realm
of philosophical phantasy.

This German Socialism, which took its school-boy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock in trade in such mountebank
fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the German, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the
liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to "True
Socialism" of confronting the political movement with the Socialist
demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism,
against representative government, against bourgeois competition,
bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois
liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had
nothing to gain and everything to lose by this bourgeois movement.
German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French
criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern
bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of
existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very
things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in
Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons,
professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome
scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.

It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets
with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German
working-class risings.

While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for
fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly
represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German
philistines. In Germany the _petty bourgeois_ class, a relique of the
16th century and since then constantly cropping up again under various
forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things.

To preserve this cl