CHAPTER VI[ToC]
THE TREND TOWARDS UNITY
"Schon laengst verbreit etsich's in ganze Scharen Das Eigenste, was im allein gehoert."
Schiller's Wallenstein.
Now, after long, that diffuses itself through large masses of men Which once was most private, which belonged to him alone.
Karl Marx closed his manifesto with the celebrated words, "Proletarians of all lands, unite yourselves!" He uttered this cry on the eve of the revolution of 1848, which was admittedly proletarian-socialistic in its character, in various places, but which exhausted itself in those separate spots where it had broken out. In Germany, where Marx himself stood in the battle, it reached no importance. In England, it seemed for a moment as if the February revolution would infuse new life into the old Chartism; but this had already been buried. The French movement is the only one left; how it ended is well known. And then the deep night of the reaction of the 'fifties settled upon Europe. All the seeds of an independent working-men's movement were suppressed. Only in England the trade-union movement was developed.
Since the beginning of the year 1860 signs of life among the working people have appeared in different places. They recover here and there from the blows and repression which they experienced during and after the agitation of 1848, and an interest and participation in public life begin again to awake. The characteristic trait is this: the activity of the new and independent life receives an international stamp. Naturally this is no mere chance. It was not by chance that, at the World's Exposition, the working men of different lands first reached the hand one to another; it was a development of capitalism itself, stepping upon a stage of international largeness. The Continental powers of Europe began to rival England. Commercial politics were first of all robbed of their exclusive character through a series of treaties, and were directed towards the unifying of business life throughout Europe.
Since those first beginnings, at about the year 1860, the idea of internationalism has never quite disappeared from proletarian agitation, even though it may have experienced in the course of the years essential changes in the form of its development.
It will be my duty in what follows to show to you how this tendency towards internationalism, after many abortive attempts, has been really carried out, and how, in close connection with it as concerns goal and progress, the social agitations of individual lands more and more press towards a unity upon the principles of the Marxian programme.