574 THE CLASS STRUGGLE LETTER TO THE POLISH SOCIALISTS 575 ciation. The Polish uprising of 1863, giving cause for a common protest of English and French workers against the perfidious international actions of their governments, caused the formation of the International which arose with the co operation of the Polish emigrants. And, finally, among them the Paris Commune found its true leaders; after its fall, before the Versailles Court Martial, it sufficed to call one self a Pole to be shot.
And so, the Poles played outside the boundaries of their own country a great role in the struggle for proletarian emancipation; they were in the full sense of the word its international champions. Let that struggle extend itself today within the Polish nation itself, let her be upheld by the emigrant press and propaganda, let her go arm in arm with her Russian brethren with their unequalled efforts, and then will be found one more reason for the repetition of the old cry, Long live Poland.
Greetings and Fraternity, live Poland, which arose at that time throughout entire Western Europe, was not only an expression of sympathy and respect for the patriotic warriors, crushed by brute force; with this cry it still joyously welcomes a nation all the uprisings of which so unfortunate for itself always dammed the counter revolutionary current, and her bravest sons everlastingly conducted the war of counter attacks, fighting everywhere under the banner of the people revolutions. On the other hand the dismemberment of Poland established the Holy Alliance which acted as a mantle for the ascendancy of the czar over all the governments of Europe. For that reason, therefore, the cry, Long live Poland indicated: death to the Holy Alliance, death to the supporters of militarized Russia, Prussia and Austria, death to the Mongolian rule over contemporary society.
From 1830, when the bourgeoisie took hold more or less of the political power in France and England, the proletarian movement commenced to make itself prominent. From 1840 the possessing classes in England were forced to seek military intervention in order to support themselves against the party of Chartists, that first militant organization of the working class. In the last asylum of Independent Poland, in Cracow, there burst, in 1848, the first political revolution which sets forth the declaration of social rights. From that moment Poland loses all the false sympathies of entire Europe.
In 1847 the first international proletarian congress secretly takes place in London. It gives out the Communist Manifesto which ends with the new revolutionary shibboleth: Proletarians of all countries, unite. Poland had its representatives at this congress, whose resolutions, at a public meeting in Brussels, the famed Lelewel and his supporters, accepted. The revolutionary armies of 1848 9, German, Italian, Hungarian, Rumanian, were full of Poles who distinguished themselves as soldiers and commanders. Although socialistic tendencies of the epoch were drowned in the blood of the June days, it must not be forgotten that the revolution of 1848, in sweeping the whole of Europe, created for the moment one polity of all the nations and in this way prepared the ground for the International Workers Asso (Signed) Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Paul Lafargue, Lessner, London, 27th September, 1880.