126 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYwhat was to become the International Democratic Association, a body
modelled on the Fraternal Democrats in London. (At this time many
political meetings were held under the guise of dinners as they were more
difficult for the police to control.) The dinner had been arranged on the
initiative of Bornstedt. Marx had briefly gone to Maastricht to see his
brother-in-law on family business. Although Engels regarded the holding
of the dinner as an anti-communist move, he managed to be chosen as
one of its vice-presidents and also a member of the committee that was
to establish the Association. Engels promptly delegated his place to Marx
and left for Paris where he renewed his contacts with French socialists and
republican leaders; and Marx was duly chosen as Vice-President of the
Association. The Association held meetings, established a number of
branches in Belgium, and issued addresses on such subjects as the threat
to freedom in Switzerland and the anniversary of the Polish revolution.^126
But Marx had other and more pressing business to attend to: at the
end of October he received a letter from the Central Committee of
the Communist League in London telling him that the congress had been
put off until the end of November and urging him to attend in person.
On 27 November Marx left Brussels in the company of Weerth and
Victor Tedesco; he met Engels at Ostend on the twenty-eighth and, with
Tedesco, they crossed the Channel on the twenty-ninth. Ostensibly Marx
went as a delegate of the Democratic Association to attend a meeting of
the Fraternal Democrats in celebration of the Polish uprising of 1830.
The evening after his arrival in London Marx duly delivered an 'ener-
getic'^127 speech to the Fraternal Democrats, meeting in the headquarters
of the German Workers' Educational Association at 20 Great Windmill
Street, near Piccadilly.^128 The downfall of the established order, he told
them, 'is no loss for those who have nothing to lose in the old society
and this is the case in all countries for the great majority. They have,
rather, everything to gain from the collapse of the old society which is
the condition for the building of a new society no longer based on class
opposition.'^129 Marx concluded by proposing Brussels as the venue for the
following year's meeting, but this proposal was overtaken by events.
The next day, in the same building, the second congress of the Com-
munist League began. According to Engels, 'Marx... defended the new
theory during fairly lengthy debates. All opposition and doubt was at last
overcome and the new principles were unanimously accepted.'^130 The
debates lasted a full ten days, during which new statutes were drawn up
making it quite clear that the Communist League (although necessarily
operating largely in secret) was to have a democratic structure ultimately
dependent on an annual congress and have as its principal purpose the
propagation of publicly declared doctrines. The statutes adopted in June