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158
VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
man poet
— "the iron lark" — who led a band of revolutionists
into Baden.
"We arose vehemently against these
attempts to play at revolution," says Engels, speaking
for himself and Marx. "In the state of fermentation
which then existed in Germany, to carry into our
country an invasion which was destined to import the
revolution by force, was to injure the revolution in
Germany, to consolidate the governments, and . . .
to deliver the legions over defenseless to the German
troops." (3) Wilhelm Liebknecht, then twenty-two
years of age, who was in favor of Herwegh's project,
wrote afterward of Marx's opposition. Marx "understood
that the plan of organizing 'foreign legions' for
the purpose of carrying
the revolution into
other countries
emanated from the French bourgeois-republicans,
and that the 'movement' had been artificially inspired
with the twofold intention of getting rid of troublesome
elements and of carrying off the foreign laborers whose
competition made itself doubly felt during this grave
business crisis." (4)
Undeterred by Marx, Herwegh marshaled his
"legions" and entered Baden, to be utterly crushed, exactly
as Marx had foreseen. A quarrel then arose between
Marx and Bakounin over Herwegh's project. Far
from changing Marx's mind, however, it made him suspect
Bakounin as perhaps in the pay of the reactionaries.
In any case, he made no effort to prevent the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung from printing shortly after the following:
"Yesterday it was asserted that George Sand
was in possession of papers which seriously compromised
the Russian who has been banished from here,
Michael Bakounin, and represented him as an instrument
or an agent of Russia, newly enrolled, to whom is
attributed the leading part in the recent arrest of the