i8o KARL MARX! A BIOGRAPHY'in twenty-four hours, through Marx, we had conquered the terrain and
the paper was ours, though we had agreed to take Heinrich Burgers on
to the editorial committee'.^24 Money was their chief difficulty: Engels
left to collect subscriptions in the Wuppertal but met with no success.
Of his father, he wrote that 'he would sooner send us iooo bullets than
1000 thaler'.^25 In the end they raised only 13,00 0 thaler out of the 30,00 0
which had been their aim, and Marx had to contribute substantially from
his own pocket. The provenance of the share money was severely criticised
in the paper of the Workers' Association, edited by Gottschalk: Marx's
paper, it was said, had put itself in the hands of the 'money aristocracy'
and its printer, Clouth, had lowered wages and tried to impose no-strike
agreements on his workers. Clouth replied that he had merely refused to
raise wages; and that the editorial board had no control over the printing
workers. The editorial board was composed entirely of members of the
Communist League with the exception of Burgers, who was soon forced
out. According to Engels, Marx exercised 'a dictatorship pure and simple'
which was 'completely natural, uncontested and freely accepted. By the
clarity of his vision and the resoluteness of his principles he made
the paper into the most famous of the revolutionary period.'^26 The only
criticism voiced was that Marx worked too slowly 'Marx is no journalist
and never will be,' wrote Born. 'He spends a whole day on a leading
article that another would write in two hours, as though it was concerned
with the solution of a deep philosophical problem. He changes and pol-
ishes and changes the changed and can never be ready in time.'^27
From the start the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was conceived as a national
paper containing little local news. Engels contributed most of the leading
articles in the early period and followed developments in France and
England, while Marx concentrated on internal politics. Its general charac-
ter was factual and ironically descriptive rather than theoretical, and there
was an attractive Feuilleton edited by Georg Weerth.
Marx had arrived in Germany with the hope of reproducing there the
sort of revolutionary situation that he had experienced in Paris, but he
soon realised that this was beyond the bounds of possibility. The German
'revolution' had been a very partial one: only in Berlin and Vienna had
there been any serious violence, and in the whole of Germany only one
prince lost his throne - let alone his head. In 1848 it was only possible to
modify autocratic structures: these did not entirely disappear until after the
First World War. For the autocratic Government managed to retain con-
trol both of the army and of the administration that was more powerful
than that in either France or England (since it controlled the development
of the economy which at that time needed protection). There were two
main reasons for this necessarily limited character of the 1848 revolution.