Then, in Mill's words, England can turn into a China (an improved one, of course), retaining all her trade and all her freedom and perfecting her legislation, that is, easing it in proportion to the growth of obligatory custom, which deadens the will better than any lawcourts or punishments; and France at the same time can launch herself into the beautiful, martial stream-bed of Persian life, which is enlarged with everything that an educated centralisation puts in the hands of authority, rewarding herself for the loss of all the rights of man with brilliant attacks on her neighbours and shackling other peoples to the fortunes of a centralised despotism . . . already the features of Zouaves belong more to Asia than to Europe.
Forestalling ejaculations and maledictions I hasten to say that I am not speaking here of my desires, or even of my opinions.
My task is the purely logical one of trying to eliminate the brackets from the formula in which Mill's result is expressed ; from his individual differE'ntials to form the historical integral.
So the question cannot be whether it is polite to prophesy for England the fate of China (and it was not I who did this, but Mill himself) , or in good taste to foretell that France will be a
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Persia; although in all fairness I do not know, either, how it comes that China and Persia may be insulted with impunity.
The really important question, that Mill does not touch upon, is this: do there exist the sources of a new vigour to renovate the old blood? Are there sprouts and sound shoots to grow up through the dwindling grass? And what this question adds up to is whether a people will let itself be used once and for all to manure the soil for a new China and a new Persia, condemned inescapably to unskilled labour, to ignorance and hunger, accepting in return that one in ten thousand, as in a lottery, for an example, encouragement and appeasement to the rest, shall grow rich and turn from eaten to eater?
This problem will be solved by events: it cannot be solved theoretically.
If the people is overcome, the new China and new Persia are inevitable.
But if the people overcomes, what is unavoidable 1s a social revolution.
Is this not indeed an idea that may be promoted to an idee fixe, in spite of the shoulder-shrugging of the aristocracy and the tooth-grinding of the petite bourgeoisieJ
The people feels this: very much so. Gone is its earlier, childish belief in the legality-or at all events the justice-of what happens: there is fear in the face of violence, and inability to exalt private pain into a general rule ; but blind faith there is not. In France the people menacingly declared its protest at the very time when the middle class, flushed with authority and power, was crowning itself king under the name of a republic, was lolling with Marrast in Louis XV's armchairs at Versailles and dictating laws. The people rose in despair, seeing that again it was being left outside the door and without a piece of bread; it rose like barbarians, with nothing decided, no plan, no leaders, no resources; but of vigorous personalities it had no lack and, what is more, it evoked from the other side such predatory, bloodthirsty kites as Cavaignac.
The people was utterly routed. The likelihood of a Persia increased and it has bt>en increasing ever since.
How the English working man will put his social question we do not know, but his ox-like stubbornness is great. He has the numerical majority on his side, but not the power. Numbers prove nothing. Two or three Cossacks of the line with two or three garrison soldiers each of them take five hundred convicts from Moscow to Siberia.
If the people in England is routed, as it was in Germany at the
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time of the Peasants' Wars and in France during the July days, then the China foretold by John Stuart Mill is not far off. The transition to it will take place imperceptibly; not a single right, as we have said, will be lost, not one freedom will be diminished: all that will be diminished is the ability to make use of these rights and this freedom.
Timid and sensitive people say that this is impossible. I desire nothing better than to agree with them: but I see no reason to.
The tragic inevitability consists in j ust this: the idea that might rescue the people and steer Europe towards new destinies is unprofitable for the ruling class; and for this class, if it were consistent and audacious, the only thing that is profitable is ruling-combined with an American system of slavery!
THE GERMAN EMIGRANTS were distinguished from the others1 by their ponderous, prosy and cantankerous nature. There were no enthusiasts among them, as there were among the Italians, no hotheads nor sharp tongues, as among the French.
The other emigrants had little to do with them; the difference of manners, of habitus, kept them at a certain distance: French arrogance has nothing in common with German boorishness.
The absence of a commonly accepted notion of good manners, the heavy, scholastic doctrinairism, the excessive familiarity, the excessive naivete of the Germans hampered their relationships with people who were not used to them. They did not make many advances themselves . . . considering, on the one hand, that they greatly excelled others in their scientific development and, on the other, feeling in the presence of others the awkwardness of a provincial in a salon at the capital and of a civil service clerk in a coterie of aristocrats.
Internally the German emigrants displayed the same friability as their country did. They had no common plan; their unity was supported by mutual hatred and malicious persecution of each 1 After the rout of the risinp; in the Palatinate and Baden in 1 848 there was a wave of emigration from Germany. The overwhelming majority travelled to Swi tzerland and thence to E•1�land and the U.S.A. In the autumn of 1 850 London became their headquarters. ( A .S.)
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other. The better among the German exiles were conscious of this. Vigorous men, intelligent men, like Karl Schurz, August Willich and Oskar Reichenbach, had gone to America. Men of gentle disposition, like Freiligrath, were making use of business, of distant London, to hide behind. The rest, except for a few of the leaders, were tearing each other to pieces with indefatigable frenzy, unsparing of family secrets or the most criminal accusations.
Soon after my arrival in London I went to Brighton to see Arnold Ruge, who had been intimately acquainted wi.th Moscow University circles in the 1 840s; he had published the celebrated Hallische lahrbucher, and we had drawn from them our philosophical radicalism. I had met him in 1 849 in Paris, where the soil had not yet cooled and was still volcanic. There was no time then for the study of personalities. He had come as one of the agents of the insurrectionary government of Baden to invite Mierosla,vski, \vho knew no German, to take command of the army of Freischiirler and hold discussions with the government of France, which \vas not at all eager to recognise revolutionary Baden. Karl Blind was with him. After 1 3th June he and I had to flee from France. Blind was several hours late and was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. I d id not see Ruge after that till the autumn of 1 852.