Letter to Karl Marx, December 13, 1868

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 13 December 1868


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 4, Berlin, 1931
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 43


ENGELS TO MARX

IN LONDON

Manchester, 13 December 1868

Dear Moor,

If the envelope holds them, I shall send back Meyer and Serno,[1] otherwise tomorrow from the office, where I have larger envelopes.

In Meyer's letter, the juxtaposition of Bohemians and Chinese amused me. Otherwise, his false Jacob-Grimm style is a bit much for me, the art of saying as little as possible with secretive circumlocutions, and putting that little unclearly.

For a Russian, Serno writes remarkably poor French; for his pamphlet[2] he must have had a lot of help. If Nincompoop[3] knew you were corresponding with a Russian! You can then tell him 1. that the name Serno, as a masculine, is impossible in Great Russian since o is a neuter ending, whereas in Little Russian male names ending in o are very frequent, thus the man is no Muscovite but a Ruthenian, a Maloross[4] ; 2. that he is a born member of the Brimstone Gang[5] ; serny—ctpHbin—means sulphurous, from sera, sulphur; Solovyevich means son of the nightingale. I am eager to see the sheet published by these people, particularly what sort of a science he, Serno, will propound, since he so curses the ignorance of the French. However, such a French journal is always very good, much better than the Belgian Proudhonist sheets.

The story about Nincompoop is very neat.[6]

Only now do I understand what you meant with the cotton business; however, you had omitted that this also included the stocks of yarn and fabrics. But then it must be noted that, to explain things rationally, you must include 1861, when the colossal 4 million crop of 1860 gradually arrived here. How ELLISON & HAYWOOD could omit this is incomprehensible to me, unless the people had a particular business purpose in their statistics. The big American crop of 1860, which came to England in [18]61, at the time of the PAPER BLOCKADE[7] is the basis of all the later production. I shall see to it that I send you the necessary data on the subject, at least regarding raw cotton. Of course, this in no way changes the fact that, without the American War, there would certainly have been, in 1861-62, an absolutely colossal collapse, this time as the result of pure, unalloyed and unconcealed overproduction.

Weighting with CHINA CLAY (this CHINA lies in Derbyshire and Staffordshire; it is fine potter's earth, and CHINA here means porcelain) has only gained ground since 1863-64. For some years it was the secret of a comparative few. Recently, somebody was sentenced to £1,060 DAMAGES because of this, and I hope that, as soon as I am out of the firm, they will also tackle Gottfried on account of the talc-stone he sells as cotton yarn. Tussy may well curse about the yarn when 25 to 30% of it consists of sour meal sweetened with talc-stone.

I am very glad the arsenic was and continues to be so effective. I wish I were through with the murky business with Gottfried Ermen.[8] I cannot trust the rogue further than I can see him, and have to take all possible precautions. I still haven't even received the draft agreement; he puts the blame on the lawyer, but I blame it on the fact that he himself is still mulling over what additional chicanery for me he can get included in it. Luckily, I possess an epistle from him in which he himself makes the relevant proposal to me, and I myself drafted the memorandum given to the lawyer as a basis. But I already note that he is keen for me to take money out of the firm before I am quite in the clear with him—then he would have me in his hand and could squeeze me. But as soon as I have the draft, and find it to be FAIRLY DRAWN UP, I shall send you enough for you to pay off your debts and have some CASH IN HAND, and from the New Year the new arrangement will begin. I may come to visit you for a few days myself, but Nincompoop and his consorts must not know of this.

Best greetings to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ A reference to the letter from A. A. Serno-Solovyevich to Marx of 20 November 1868, in which he requested Marx, on behalf of the commission preparing the workers' newspaper L'Égalité, to be a permanent correspondent of this printed organ of the French Section of the International Working Men's Association.
  2. ↑ [A. Serno-Solovyevich,] À propos de la grève. Réponse à M. Goegg (signed with the pen name A. Ebéniste).
  3. ↑ Sigismund Borkheim
  4. ↑ Maloross is the Latin transliteration of the Russian Malopocc which means Little Russian (i.e. Ukrainian).
  5. ↑ The Brimstone Gang—a students' association at the University of Jena in the 1770s which was notorious for its brawls; subsequently the expression became widespread. In 1849-50, it was the jocular nickname of the group of German petty-bourgeois émigrés in Geneva. In 1859, petty-bourgeois democrat Karl Vogt made a number of slanderous statements in which he associated the activities of the Brimstone Gang with Marx and his followers. Marx refuted his allegations in his pamphlet Herr Vogt (see present edition, Vol. 17, pp. 28-37).
  6. ↑ See this volume, p. 178.
  7. ↑ A reference to the blockade of the Southern ports, from which cotton was shipped to England, declared by Lincoln on 19 April 1861. The blockade, which lasted till August 1865, was not very effective, however, since contraband trade developed between the Southern states and England and also between the South and the North. Liverpool played a special role in the smuggling of commodities between England and the Confederation: for the first two years of the war 31 thousand bales of pressed cotton were delivered there. (See K. Marx, 'The British Cotton Trade' and 'The Crisis in England', present edition, Vol. 19, pp. 17-20 and 53-56.)
  8. ↑ See this volume, p. 170.