and how delighted they were to hear from him again. He urges Engels to take the opportunity now to write a history or pamphlet on the rising.
When, in August, 1849, Marx was expelled from Paris and declared his intention to go to London, he writes to Engels urging him strongly also to come to London, both because it was unsafe for him to remain in Switzerland where the Prussians might get hold of him, and also for the sake of the work they could do together in London; and, indeed, very soon after, Engels followed Marx to London.
Fighting Illusions of the Democratic Refugees
Here, in London, they started intensive practical and theoretical work. Their first efforts were directed to perfecting, and as far as possible extending, the organisation of the Communist League; and not a little of their energy had to be given to explain to the large number of foreign refugees then in London that for the time being the counter-revolution had won the upper hand and it was useless there and then to appeal for an immediate violent revolution. In a monthly review established by them, and published in Hamburg,they endeavoured to find the economic reason for the failure of the February revolution; and they found it in the discovery of the Californian Goldfields, which gave: a fillip to world production and commerce that could not lightly be brushed aside and would not speedily exhaust itself. Just as the commercial world crisis of 1847 was the mother of the revolution so the industrial prosperity ushered in by the discovery of the Californian Goldfields was the mother of the counter-revolution. The period was one, therefore, for agitation and education, not for revolution. In the fifth and sixth numbers of their review they published a survey of political and economic events of the 'forties, in which they show that the 1847 depression was followed by a period of prosperity, which had not yet reached its zenith in 1850. "The prosperity of England would rise still further by the newly successful opening up of the Dutch Colonies, by the prospective establishment of new means of communication on the Pacific Ocean, and by the great industrial exhibition of 1851 … this exhibition is a striking proof of concentrated power, by means of which modern great industry breaks down national barriers and obliterates local peculiarities in production, the social relations and character of the separate nations. …" This prosperity in England would, of course, react on the Continent. "In the midst of such general prosperity, when the productive forces of bourgeois society are developing as luxuriantly as is possible at all within the limits of bourgeois society, there can be no question of any real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in periods when the two factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois modes of production, come into conflict. The various quarrels in which the different factions of the party of order now indulge are, on the contrary only possible because of the security of the basis of their immediate relations and,
