Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven


Having, at the same time, ample opportunity to watch the middle-classes, your opponents, I soon came to the conclusion that you are right, perfectly right in expecting no support whatever from them. Their interest is diametrically opposed to yours, though they always will try to maintain the contrary and to make you believe in their most hearty sympathy with your fates. Their doings give them the lie. I hope to have collected more than sufficient evidence of the fact, that — be their words what they please — the middle-classes intend in reality nothing else but to enrich themselves by your labour while they can sell its produce, and to abandon you to starvation as soon as they cannot make a profit by this indirect trade in human flesh. What have they done to prove their professed goodwill towards you? Have they ever paid any serious attention to your grievances? Have they done more than paying the expenses of half-a-dozen commissions of inquiry, whose voluminous reports are damned to everlasting slumber among heaps of wastepaper on the shelves of the Home Office? Have they even done as much as to compile from thoserotting blue-books a single readable book from which everybody might easily get someinformation on the condition of the great majority of“free-born Britons”? Not they indeed, those are things they do not like to speak of

they have left it to a foreigner to inform the civilised world of the degrading situation you have to live in.A foreigner to them,not to you,I hope. Though my English may not be pure, yet, I hope, you will find it plain English. No workingman in England nor in France either, by-the-by ever treated me as a foreigner. With the greatest pleasure I observed you to be free from that blasting curse, national prejudice and national pride, which after all means nothing but wholesale selfishness.  I observed you to sympathise with every one who earnestly applies his powers to human progress — may he be an Englishman or not — to admire every thing great and good, whether nursed on your native soil or not.  I found you to be more than mere Englishmen,members of a single, isolated nation, I found you to be members of the great and universal family of Mankind, who know their interest and that of all the human race to be the same. And as such, as members of this Family of“One and Indivisible” Mankind, as Human Beings in the most emphatical meaning of the word, as such I, and many others on the Continent, hail your progress in every direction and wish you speedy success.

Go on then, as you have done hitherto. Much remains to be undergone; be firm, be undaunted —your success is certain, and no step you will have to take in your onward march will be lost to our common cause, the cause of Humanity!
Barmen (Rhenan Prussia)
March 15th, 1845