The industrial crisis of 1847, which had paved the way for the Revolution of 1848, had been overcome; a new, unprecedented period of industrial prosperity had set in; whoever had eyes to see and used them must have clearly realized that the revolutionary storm of 1848 was gradually spending itself.
"With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, _there can be no talk of a real revolution_. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come in collision with each other. The various quarrels in which the representatives of the industrial factions of the continental party of order now indulge and mutually compromise themselves, far from providing the occassion for new revolutions are, on the contrary, possible only because the basis of the relationships is momentarily so secure and, what the reaction does not know, so _bourgeois_. From it all attempts of the reaction to hold up bourgeois development _will rebound just as certainly as all moral indignation and all enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats_".
Thus Marx and I wrote in the "Revue of May to October 1850" in the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_, _Politisch-okonomische Revue_, Nos.V and VI, Hamburg, 1850, p.153.
This cool estimation of the situation, however, was regarded as heresy among many persons, at a time when Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Mazzini, Kossuth and, among the lesser German lights, Ruge, Kinkel, Gogg and the rest of them crowded in London to form provisional governments of the future not only for their respective fatherlands but for the whole of Europe, and when the only still still necessary was to obtain the requisite money from America as a loan for the revolution to realize at a moment's notice the European revolution and the various republics which went with it was a matter of course.
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