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VISIONS OF VICTORY 339
ignorant of the causes of their misery or of the nature
of their real antagonist. Not seldom in those days there
were meetings of hundreds of thousands of laborers, and
not infrequently mysterious epidemics of fires and of machine-breaking
occurred throughout all the factory districts.
Again and again the soldiers were — brought out
to massacre the laborers. In all England then the most
advanced industrially
— there were few who understood
capitalism, and among masters or men there was hardly
one who knew the real source of all the immense, intolerable
economic evils.
The class struggle was there, and it was being fought
more furiously and violently than ever before or since.
The most striking rebels of the time were those that
Marx called the "bourgeois democrats." They were forever
preaching open and violent revolution. They were
dreaming of the glorious day when, amid insurrection
and riot, they should stand at the barricades, fighting the
battle for freedom. In their little circles they "were laying
plans for the overthrow of the world and intoxicating
themselves day by day, evening by evening, with the
hasheesh-drink of: 'To-morrow it will " start;' (3) Before
and after the revolutionary period of '48 there were
innumerable thousands of these fugitives, exiles, and men
of action obsessed with the dream that a great revolutionary
cataclysm was soon to occur which would lay in
ruins the old society. That a crisis was impending everyone
believed, including even Marx and Engels.
In fact,
for over twenty years, from 1847 to 1871, the "extemporizers
of revolutions" fretfully awaited the supreme hour.
Toward the end of the period appeared Bakounin and
Nechayeff with their robber worship, conspiratory secret
societies, and international network of revolutionists.
Wherever capitalism made headway the workers grew