BRUSSELSH 5situation was drastically altered on 3 July by the arrest, on charges of
incitement to violence, of Gottschalk and Anneke who were to remain in
prison for the next six months. Moll became President of the Workers'
Association with Schapper as Vice-President. The Association immedi-
ately began to devote more time to the discussion of social and political
questions and less to practical economic demands, thereby losing a lot of
its momentum during July and August. Moll also became editor of the
Association's newspaper.
The collaboration of the three democratic organisations was now no
problem: a Committee of Cologne Democratic Unions was formed with
Moll and Schapper representing the Workers' Association, Marx and
Schneider (a lawyer) representing the Democratic Society, and the young
barrister Hermann Becker from the Union of Employees and Employers.
This committee summoned a congress of Rhineland Democrats which
met in Cologne in mid-August. At this congress, whose main conclusion
was to increase agitation among factory workers and peasants, Marx
emerged as one of the leading figures. Carl Schurz, a student at Bonn at
the time who soon afterwards emigrated and made for himself a distin-
guished career as a United States Senator and Secretary of the Interior,
wrote many years later in his memoirs of Marx's being 'already the
recognised head of the advanced socialistic school' and 'attracting general
attention', though what struck him most of all was Marx's sarcasm and
extreme intolerance.^40 Albert Brisbane, an editor of the New York Daily
Tribune for which Marx was later to write extensively, has left a slightly
different picture of the Marx he met in the autumn of 1848 :
There I found Karl Marx, the leader in the popular movement... He
was just then rising into prominence: a man of some thirty years, short,
solidly built, with a fine face and bushy black hair. His expression was
that of great energy, and behind his self-contained reserve of manner
were visible the fire and passion of a resolute soul.^41Meanwhile Marx had also had to defend his orthodoxy against the
renewed intervention of Weitling who had returned from America to
establish himself in Berlin on the outbreak of the revolution. At the same
meeting which elected Marx to the six-man committee of the Cologne
Democrats, Weitling gave a speech in favour of the separation of the
political and social movements: in his view a democracy at the present
time could only lead to chaos and he proposed a 'dictatorship of those
with most insight'.^42 Marx replied in a plenary session two weeks later
that only the interaction of social and political elements could achieve
success for either, and that the solution to political problems was not to
be found in a dictatorship but in a 'democratic government composed of