Letter to Friedrich Engels, May 8, 1856

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 8 May 1856


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 8 May[1] 1856

28 Dean Street, Soho

DEAR Frederic,

Received your letter.[2] My PRESSURE u p o n you in YESTERDAY'S LETTER explicable d'abord[3] by the fact that an earlier parcel of my wife's

did not arrive in Manchester, although sent by post. Secondly, however, you know how a man feels when he's kept on the hop by piles. And such a man am I.

I am glad to hear that you and Lupus are entirely of my opinion with regard to Miquel's letter[4] —the attempt to digest this 'wisdom' fairly 'turned my stomach'.

Unless something goes wrong with the pecuniary arrangements I have made, my family will be leaving in 10 to 14 days at the latest.[5] A pity you are so overworked, otherwise we might have done un petit tour[6] to Scodand.

1 shall carry out your commissions at die Museum[7] as soon as I go there again.

Enclosed: 2 letters, 1. from Imandt; 2. from Cologne.[8] Would it not be best if I replied to the Cologne people through my wife? THERE EXISTS SOME JEALOUSY between Cologne and Düsseldorf AS TO THE LEADING OF THE PROLETARIAN MOVEMENT. BESIDES, I don't know whether the Cologne people are aware that the Düsseldorfers have completely broken with Lassalle who has fallen into general disrepute among them.

Yesterday the following comical missive arrived from Sheffield:

»Council Hall, Sheffield, Doctor, May 6th, '56. The Sheffield Foreign Affairs Committee instructs me to convey to you an expression of their warm thanks for the great public service you have rendered by your admirable exposé of the Kars Papers published in The People's Paper[9] . I have the Honour etc.

Cyples, Secretary.*

That is magnanimous, there being war to the death between The People's Paper and The Free Press, as between Chartism and Urquhartism generally.[10] The great Ironside went one step further and decreed THAT THE THANKS OF THE COUNTRV WERE DUE TO DR. M. ETC. It would have been much better had the chaps sent me the money they made out by reprinting the Palmerston articles under the title Story of the Life etc. (in pamphlet form).[11]

From New York Seiler has sent me—came today—'Das Recht deutscher vereinigter Staatenbürger in Europa' in the Democrat[12] .

Will never be read, not in this world at any rate.

Since handing over your £2 to Pieper I haven't set eyes on him. Moreover, Jones has sent word that, up till yesterday evening, he had not delivered the work he had accepted for The People's Paper.

Nous verrons.[13] If he wilfully throws away this opportunity as well, let him go to the devil. Now's his chance, the silly ass.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Apropos! Have seen Heine's will[14] ! A return to the 'living God', and a 'Recantation before God and man' if ever he wrote anything 'immoral'!

Didn't see Colonel Touroute again before he left for Germany. Enclosed letters not to be returned. Regards to Lupus.

  1. ↑ April in the original
  2. ↑ This letter of Engels to Marx has not been found.—43
  3. ↑ first of all
  4. ↑ In his letter of 6 April 1856 Johannes von Miquel, a former member of the Communist League, asked Marx to state his views on the attitude the proletariat should take to bourgeois parties in the event of a revolution in Germany. Miquel's own statements on this question testified to a retreat from the consistendy revolutionary standpoint. He limited the tasks of the revolution to establishing a united centralised state and ignored the need for social change. He maintained that the proletariat should ally itself not only with the petty-bourgeois democrats but also with the bourgeois liberals and refrain from such revolutionary measures as might frighten the bourgeoisie away from the revolution. No answer by Marx to Miquel is extant.—42, 44
  5. ↑ See this volume, p. 33.
  6. ↑ short trip
  7. ↑ the British Museum Library
  8. ↑ The reference is to a letter of 25 April 1856 in which A. Hamacher conveyed greetings from Cologne, Elberfeld and Solingen workers and expressed their desire to maintain contact with Marx.—44
  9. ↑ K. Marx, The Fall of Kars.
  10. ↑ Marx means the polemics between the Chartists and the Urquhartites, which had been exacerbated by the publication in Urquhart's Free Press (19 January 1856) of 'The Chartist Correspondence' (see Note 9). The Urquhartites' hostility towards the revolutionary trend in the British working-class movement found expression in attempts to represent the Chartists as demagogues and agents of the Russian Tsar. The Chartists, for their part, described the Urquhartites as reactionaries advocating a restoration of the customs and practices of the Middle Ages. A sharp controversy developed, in particular, over the future of Parliament. The Chartists held that it should be reformed on democratic principles and used as an instrument of social change, whereas the Urquhartites advocated total abolition of the representative system and a return to patriarchal forms of government.—32, 44
  11. ↑ In 1856 Marx's series of articles Lord Palmerston, originally intended for and partly published in the New-York Daily Tribune (see present edition, Vol. 12), appeared in Sheffield under the title The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston ( The Free Press Serials, No. 5, 1856). This was a reproduction of the series as published under the same title between December 1855 and February 1856 in several issues of The Free Press, the Urquhartites' London paper. Apart from this, one of the articles, published in The Sheffield Free Press in November 1855, appeared as a pamphlet in Sheffield in 1856 (The Free Press Serials, No. 4a).—44, 58
  12. ↑ New Yorker Demokrat
  13. ↑ We shall see.
  14. ↑ This refers to Heine's third will, which he dictated to notaries F. L. Ducloux and Ch. L. E. Rousse on 13 November 1851.—45