78 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
Evangelium. In the same year a humble clerk in a Pennsylvania
town wrote the author to ask for an English edition, to be circu
lated among the miners and farmers of his neighborhood. Al
though there was a rapid decline in the workers' organizations of
Switzerland after Weitling's expulsion and a reversion to the
"medieval slumber" or to the beer hall conviviality of earlier days,
Weitling's friends reported that the libraries of their once active
societies still contained some of the old radical literature. "People
still inquire about you," wrote a friend from Zurich in May, 1854,
and "many an Evangelium still finds its way from house to house,
and from hut to hut." "Be comforted, old man, you did not sit in
the Zurich jail in vain... ." "Do not forget your friends in
Europe, for they have not forgotten you. Send us several numbers
of your Republik der Arbeiter... ."^4 To the end of the 1880's,
long after the communist movement had forgotten its erstwhile
leader and Weitling had died in the United States in poverty and
oblivion, some of his publications still were banned by the Austrian
police.
At the time of Weitling's arrest, Switzerland, and Zurich in par
ticular, was in a turmoil over communism, the Young Germany
movement, atheism, and other radical doctrines which refugees
from all over Europe had brought with them to their new asylum
among the Alps. Radicals have never been noted for their una
nimity of opinion or for their ability to co-operate, and there was
much friction and strife among the Swiss refugees. They not only
intrigued against each other, but occasionally reported their rivals
to the police. The secret societies were weakened by factional
controversies, dissolutions, and expulsions based on trials to de
termine the orthodoxy of the members and their complete alle
giance to the official doctrine. Such factional strife became an issue
in the domestic politics of some of the Swiss cantons, and there is
evidence to show that the trial of the author of the Evangelium was used by Bluntschli and other conservatives in Zurich to em
barrass their political opponents, and particularly to break the
(^4) See Rep. d. Arb., June 24, 1854; also July 26, 1851, and January 7, 1854.