His parliamentary activity brought him no laurels other than the fact that his own party despaired at so much folly. At the same time his Reform was going downhill, a situation that could only be remedied, as he thought, by his personal presence in Berlin. As an "honest consciousness"it goes without saying that he also discovered an urgent political reason for taking such a step and in fact he demanded that the whole of the Left should accompany him there. Naturally, they refused and Ruge went to Berlin alone. Once there, he discovered that modern conflicts can best be resolved by the "Dessau method" as he termed the small state, a model of constitutional democracy. Then during the siege [of Vienna] he again drew up a manifesto in which General Wrangel was exhorted to march against Windischgraetz and free Vienna. He even obtained the approval of the democratic Congress for this curious document by pointing out that the type had been set up and that it was already being printed. Finally, when Berlin itself came under siege, Ruge went to Manteuffel and made proposals concerning the Reform , which were, however, rejected. Manteuffel told him that he wished all opposition papers were like the Reform , the Neue Preussische Zeitung [32] was much more dangerous to him -- an utterance which the naive Ruge, with a tone of triumphant pride, hastened to report through the length and breadth of Germany. Arnold became an enthusiastic advocate of passive resistance which he himself put into practice by leaving his paper, editors and everything in the lurch and running away. Active flight is evidently the most resolute form of passive resistance. The counter-revolution had arrived and Ruge fled before it all the way from Berlin to London without stopping.
At the time of the May uprising in Dresden [33] Arnold placed himself at the head of the movement in Leipzig together with his friend Otto Wigand and the city council. He and his allies issued a vigorous manifesto to the citizens of Dresden urging them to fight bravely; Ruge, Wigand and the city fathers, it went on, were sitting watching in Leipzig and whoever did not desert himself would not be deserted by Heaven. Scarcely had the manifesto been published than our brave Arnold took to his heels and fled to Karlsruhe.
In Karlsruhe he felt unsafe even though the Baden troops were standing on the Neckar and hostilities were a long way from breaking out.
He asked Brentano to send him to Paris as ambassador. Brentano permitted himself the joke of giving him the post for I2 hours and then revoking it just when Ruge was about to depart. Undaunted, Ruge still went to Paris together with Schutz and Blind, the official representatives of the Brentano government, and once there made such a spectacle of himself that his former editor announced in the official Karlsruhe Zeitung that Mr. Ruge was not in Paris in any official capacity but mercy "on his own initiative".
