the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having
overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true
requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the
proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who
belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm
of philosophical fantasy.

This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously
and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such
mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic
innocence.

The fight of the German, and especially, of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the
liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to "True"
Socialism of confronting the political movement with the
Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas
against liberalism, against representative government, against
bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois
legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to
the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose,
by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick
of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was,
presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its
corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political
constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment
was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.