Letter to Karl Marx, April 13, 1870

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 13 April 1870


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 April 1870

Dear Moor,

Best thanks for the parlamentaires.[1] Some of them anticipated my wishes; others were new to me and very handy. I am sending you several numbers of Zukunft to give you an opportunity to admire the infinitely foul methods used by the National Liberals in the debate on political crimes (Criminal Code). This excels everything. The cowardly rogues believe they have performed such a deed of heroism with the abolition of the death sentence for common crimes—and that, too, only on paper—that political offenders may now be calmly imprisoned in convict jails and treated as COMMON CONVICTS.[2] For political crimes, powder and lead will continue to exist, through the agency of martial law.

Enclosed—a jolly letter from Wilhelm, which I request returned for the sake of answering. You will see that the fellow acts as though I were copying from him. He has not yet firmly established his Leipzig sheet,[3] and already wants to start a daily in Berlin.[4] The fellow always sees the heavens filled with melodious violins,[5] but the strings are missing and the sounding-board is smashed.

After various interruptions I am finally finished with Wakefield[6] —1600-1700 pages quarto.

The book is gruesomely written and still more gruesomely printed—nearly all figures and dates are wrong—but, as far as the material is concerned, unequalled in my practice. I have never before seen something so complete about a country. And the fellow has eyes and is fairly honest. The anxiety of the English concerning Ireland from 1808 to 1812 is priceless. Dispatches sent to India in which Lord W. Bentinck declared that Ireland was lost for England, were intercepted by the French and published.

It is striking 8 o'clock; I must run to catch the post. Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ parliamentary materials
  2. ↑ Between 22 February and 28 May 1870, the North German Reichstag held a debate on the criminal code. On 1 March, the Reichstag voted for the abolition of capital punishment; on 15 March, the liberals suggested that for political prisoners, hard labour should be replaced by imprisonment, but whenever a political crime had been committed for dishonest reasons, penal servitude should be retained. This motion, which gave the government an opportunity to put political prisoners in convict prisons, was passed by the Reichstag. The debate on the criminal code ended on 25 May 1870, with capital punishment restored on the insistence of the government on 23 May.
  3. ↑ Der Volksstaat
  4. ↑ In a letter to Engels of 5 April 1870, Liebknecht wrote about his plan to go to Berlin and try and found a cheap daily newspaper there. In the same letter, he spoke highly of Engels' preface to the second edition of The Peasant War in Germany (present edition, Vol. 21), and wrote that the views expounded by Engels coincided with his own. He also intended to publish his report on the land question in Germany in connection with the decisions of the Basle Congress to abolish private property on land (see notes 447 and 458).
  5. ↑ The German 'ihm hängt der Himmel voller Geigen' corresponds to the English 'he sees everything in rosy colours'.
  6. ↑ E. Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political.