Letter to Friedrich Engels, March 22, 1851

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 22 March 1851


First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 38, p. 322

TO ENGELS[1] IN MANCHESTER

[London, 22 March 1851]

Dear Engels,

Above you will find the splendid document which I got Pieper to copy out for you. On the pretext of having guaranteed Mazzini's loan, Ruge is calling for money to be converted into 'public opinion'. Among the 'Prussians' here, Bücher, Eisner, Zimmermann, etc., there is great indignation at these 'vigorous provisionals'.

As for the 'six' who have caused you so much trouble[2] , those 6 were Landolphe and Blanc, Willich and Schapper, Barthélémy and Vidil, in a word, the 6 matadors; Hungarians, Poles, etc., the unconsulted mob, did not figure.

In the 3rd letter Willich is replying to nothing but the expression of his own thoughts.[3] N'a reçu ni lettre ni rien de la part des Becker et des Schramm?[4] Today will be an agreeable day for the lad. About a fortnight ago Wolff[5] encountered him in a whores' coffee house at 2 o'clock in the morning and loudly exclaimed: 'What? The virtuous Willich here?' Whereupon the virtuous one sloped off.

The actual contriver of the German central dodge[6] is the tireless, leathery Struve, bunion specialist and herbivore. All the fellow's up to is the old business of using cranioscopy, morality and suchlike trivialities to draw attention to himself. A quack, and one with a hoarse, laryngitical voice to boot. For the past 25 years the jackass has been writing a 'democratic political encyclopaedia' and a 'democratic universal history',[7] the first being nothing more than Welcker-Rotteck translated into Struvese, the second, Rotteck democratically paraphrased. And Ruge has sunk so low that only the compassion of the police prevented him from printing this nonsense in Germany.

That dim-witted Kinkel is good at ridding the philistines of their illusions. No better means of unmasking this jackass than for him to fall into the hands of such highly experienced harlequins as Struve and Ruge. In that company, at any rate, he'll lose his lion's skin.

Your

K. Marx

A few days ago Jones came to see me and, especially in view of the latest revelations, is congratulating himself on having been saved by me from taking part in the banquet.

  1. ↑ The beginning of this letter was written on the last page of Wilhelm Pieper's letter to Engels of 22 March 1851 in which Pieper on Marx's request cites the full text of the proclamation 'To the Germans' issued by Ruge, Struve, Haug, Ronge and Kinkel on 13 March 1851 on behalf of the Committee for German Affairs ('Der Ausschuss für die deutschen Gelegenheiten') set up by them at the time. An abridged version of the proclamation was quoted by Marx and Engels in The Great Men of the Exile (see present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 297-98).
  2. ↑ See this volume, p. 319
  3. ↑ See this volume, p. 319.
  4. ↑ Has received neither letter nor anything else from the Beckers and the Schramms.
  5. ↑ Ferdinand Wolff
  6. ↑ the Committee for German Affairs
  7. ↑ Marx has in mind the Weltgeschichte which Struve was working upon at the time and which was published by him in 9 volumes in New York, beginning in 1856. In 1864 it was published in 6 volumes in Coburg.