Page 72 sur 88

To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of

things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the

bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction; on the one

hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the

rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to

kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of

rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this

transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their

sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully

increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on

its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own

calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois

Philistine.