Such were the doctrines and tactics proclaimed by Marx and Engels in 1847. The Manifesto is said to have been received with great enthusiasm by the League, but, whatever happened at the moment, it is clear that the members never understood the doctrines manifested. In any case, various factions in the movement were still clamoring for insurrection and planning their conspiracies, wholly faithful to the revolution-making artifices of the period. Two of the most prominent, Willich and Schapper, were carried away with revolutionary passion, and "the majority of the London workers," Engels says, "refugees for the most part, followed them into the camp of the bourgeois democrats, the revolution-makers."[16] They declined to listen to protests. "They wanted to go the other way and to make revolutions," continues Engels. "We refused absolutely to do this and the schism followed."[17] On the 15th of September, 1850, Marx decided to resign from the central council of the organization, and, feeling that such an act required some justification, he prepared the following written declaration: "The minority[R] [_i. e._, his opponents] have substituted the dogmatic spirit for the critical, the idealistic interpretation of events for the materialistic. Simple will power, instead of the true relations of things, has become the motive force of revolution. While we say to the working people: 'You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and wars between nations not only to change existing conditions, but to change yourselves and make yourselves worthy of political power,' you, on the contrary, say, 'We ought to get power at once, or else give up the fight.' While we draw the attention of the German workman to the undeveloped state of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetish of the words 'the people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.' Like them, you substitute revolutionary phrases for revolutionary evolution."[18] This statement of Marx is one of the most significant documents of the period and certainly one of the most illuminating we possess of Marx's determination to disavow the insurrectionary ideas then so prevalent throughout Europe. Although he had said the same thing before in other words, there could be no longer any doubt that he cherished no dreams of a great revolutionary cataclysm, nor fondled the then prevalent theory that revolutions could be organized, planned, and executed by will power alone.