IN SWITZERLAND 4?
ling had offered to serve as manager without pay as long as there
were no profits and had been rejected, the treasurer absconded
with 9 ,000 francs. With few exceptions, the movement was a fail
ure in Switzerland. Weitling tried to revive it later in the United
States. In 1850, years after the founder had left Switzerland for
ever, F. A. Sorge, an early socialist, discovered a German workers'
club in Geneva which had been for a time under Weitling's leader
ship and which he described as a place dedicated to serious dis
cussion and wholesome recreation, "without envy or distrust." In
1854 a correspondent writing from Zurich to Weitling in New
York reported that his labors had not been in vain, that a com
munist club still existed, and that copies of his books still circulated
from house to house.^21 With such isolated reports Weitling had to
be content. They provided the only evidence that his labors in
Switzerland had not been entirely fruitless.
Weitling's experiences from the time of his arrival in Switzer
land to the time of his arrest, confinement, and expulsion centered
largely in the history of these communist workers' clubs. He
created many of them, and they languished after his departure.
He carried on an extensive, shrewd, and disarming secret cor
respondence with scores of the initiates, periodically visited the
groups which he had founded, and was accepted as their "spiritual
head" and chief theoretician. Harassed by the authorities, he
moved from canton to canton to avoid arrest. He became involved
in heated controversies with local leaders as he tried to keep the
control of the movement firmly in his own hands. References in
his correspondence to his "torn and bleeding heart," to "the ship
wreck" of his plans, and to the "cross" he had to bear for others
indicate a psychological strain that brought him close to a com
plete breakdown and manifest an increasing reliance on the ter
minology and comforts of religion.
Under pressures of this kind, it was perhaps inevitable that
Weitling should become more vain and less amenable to honest
(^21) See Die Neue Zeit (Stuttgart), 17. Jahrgang, II (1899), 320; and Rep. d.
Arb., June 24, 1854.