26 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
loved their neighbors, lived in the happy days of communal prop
erty, and professed a religion which was in complete conformity
with the law of nature. Weitling cited such leaders as Thomas
Münzer, champion of the religion of the "inner light," who died
a martyr in the Peasants' War after the battle of Frankenhausen;
Johann von Leyden, the tailor of Westphalia who became a com
munist leader; and Lamennais, the communist priest, as examples
of the kind of Messianic leadership that would be needed to make
the Bible once more an effective document of revolution. Such
passages suggest that Weitling already had visions of himself in
the role of the new Messiah of the "second coming," an idea that
developed eventually into a strong and strange fixation. The open
ing pages of Die Menschheit appealed for workers in the vineyards
of the Lord, for laborers who would go into the harvest fields and
whose sickles would be "whetted on the golden rule." Men were
called to practice love, Christ's first law, and to combat the sins of
selfishness, fear, and cowardice.
It was not difficult to point out the gross inequalities that flour
ished in the existing social order, in which the laborer, who created
all wealth, enjoyed it least and in which many were employed in
wasteful occupations, in the army, or in the production of lux
uries, and the whole economic system seemed to pit the rich against
the poor. Contrary to the views of some of his contemporaries,
however, Weitling did not trace all the workers' woes to the intro
duction of power-driven machinery. He was aware that machines
caused technological unemployment and created new inequities;
nevertheless, he welcomed their greater speed and power and
hoped eventually to harness them in the service of labor itself. Al
though workers blamed the machines, tradesmen the guilds, and
farmers the seasons, he was sure that the real cancer gnawing at
the vitals of society was the unequal distribution and consumption
of goods, the unequal apportionment of the labor necessary to
produce them, and the vicious monetary system which sustained
and perpetuated these inequalities. Because money was the root
of all evil and the cause of all envy, Weitling had no faith in any