To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons,
professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome
scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.

It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and
bullets with which these same governments, just at that time,
dosed the German working-class risings.

While this "True" Socialism thus served the governments as a
weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time,
directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the
German Philistines. In Germany the petty-bourgeois class, a
relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly
cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis
of the existing state of things.

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