Letter to Friedrich Engels, May 14, 1869

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 14 May 1869


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


MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 14 May 1869

DEAR FRED,

My wife will come back only sometime next week, so I cannot be in Manchester AT THE OPPORTUNE TIME.

Eichhoff left yesterday. His proposal — quant à[1] the Peasant War—is that his brother should publish the stuff and that he pay out the balance ON BEHALF of the 'International' at the next Book Fair, after subtracting his commission and costs.[2] He says: as far as his brother is concerned, you may regard the proposal as definitive.

With regard to Herr Vogt: When Liebknecht was arrested in Berlin, he left everything in confusion and, ditto, he did not clear up at the time of his EXPULSION. So 'he cannot remember' what happened to Vogt. Eichhoff finally discovered that a second-hand bookseller had been advertising the book for 2 years in his sales catalogue. He visited the fellow, named Kampfmeyer. He had sold them all, and 'ditto cannot remember' how the books came into his hands. So everything Liebknecht told us was—fiction, to put it mildly.

The press here is lousy. First, they have suppressed like one man every word of our Belgian MISSIVE[3] (after deliberately publishing last week some stupid lines in the sense of Cherval, probably written by the police member of the Brussels special committee); and not only that, they have ditto like one man suppressed our Address to the AMERICAN LABOR UNION[4] (written by me, approved last Tuesday[5] ), although this is against war between the UNITED STATES and England.[6] But there are things in it that these blackguards do not like.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ regarding
  2. ↑ See this volume, pp. 211 and 237.
  3. ↑ K. Marx, 'The Belgian Massacres'.
  4. ↑ K. Marx, 'Address to the National Labour Union of the United States'.
  5. ↑ 11 May
  6. ↑ Marx wrote the 'Address to the National Labour Union of the United States' (see Note 146) in connection with the threat of war between Britain and the USA which arose in the spring of 1869, and read it on 11 May at the General Council meeting. The English text was published as a separate leaflet and also in The Bee-Hive, No. 396, 15 May 1869; the German version appeared in the Demokratisches Wochenblatt, No. 21, 22 May, and Der Vorbote, No. 8, August 1869 (see present edition, Vol. 21).