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THE BIRTH OF MODERN SOCIALISM 141
"the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms,
and of classes generally." (15)
Such were the doctrines and tactics proclaimed by
Marx and Engels in 1847. Tne Manifesto is said to have
been received with great enthusiasm by the League, but,
whatever happened at the moment, it is clear that the
members never understood the doctrines manifested. In
any case, various factions in the movement were still
clamoring for insurrection and planning their conspiracies,
wholly faithful to the revolution-making artifices
of the period. Two of the most prominent, Willich and
Schapper, were carried away with revolutionary passion,
and "the majority of the London workers," Engels says,
"refugees for the most part, followed them into the camp
of the bourgeois democrats, the revolution-makers." (16)
They declined to listen to protests. "They wanted to go
the other way and to make revolutions," continues Engels.
"We refused absolutely to do this and the schism
followed." (17)
On the 15th of September, 1850, Marx decided to resign
from the central council of the organization, and,
feeling that such an act required some justification, he
prepared the following written declaration : "The minority
* [i. e., his opponents] have substituted the dogmatic
spirit for the critical, the idealistic interpretation of
events for the materialistic. Simple will power, instead
of the true relations of things, has become the motive
force of revolution. While we say to the working people
: 'You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty
years of civil wars and wars between nations not only to
change existing conditions, but to change yourselves and
*In the authority cited below this appears as "the minority,"
but I notice that in Jaures' "Studies in Socialism," p. 44, it
appears as "the majority."