Letter to Karl Marx, May 8, 1870

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 8 May 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 in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 43


ENGELS TO MARX[1]

IN LONDON

Manchester, 8 May 1870

Dear Moor,

With his plot-comedy, Mr Pietri appears to me to have far overshot the mark. In the end the policemen don't even believe one another's buffoonery. It's really too fine. This scurvy Bonaparte has a fixed remedy for every sickness; in case of a plebiscite, the populus must be given a dose of assassination, just as every quack begins every bigger treatment with a strong laxative. I am longing to hear the result of the treatment; so far I know only about the Paris vote, which was so good that all forgeries by officials could not falsify it completely.[2]

The Daily News and Observer virtually announced that the English police had obtained the necessary and telegraphed it to the French police. With the FENIAN SCARE the English police have completely dropped their disguise and are baser than any other. NB. Do use thinner paper for your envelopes; I could open these thick envelopes without leaving a trace.

You really should publish in France and Germany the heroic deeds of the English police regarding the International and Flourens.[3]

10,000 COPIES=£40 is damned cheap; I would have expected The Standard to sell itself dearer. This manner of bribery has, however, long been common here.

Flerovsky[4] does not appear to have been confiscated; there are copies at least in Leipzig. My bookseller, the jackass, did not order the Russian text but a non-existent English translation. Hence the non-arrival.

So Колокол [Kolokol] will be even finer under Bakunin than it was under Herzen.[5]

Monsieur Wilhelm[6] is no longer to be borne. You will have seen that 'owing to the absence of the printer' (who is, thus, the real editor), the Peasant War[7] was printed in a mix-up that Grandperret could not have managed better and, at the same time, the dunderhead has the impudence to affix marginal notes that are complete nonsense, without any note as to authorship, and everyone will ascribe them to me. I have already forbidden him to do this once before, and he was piqued; but the nonsense is laid on so thick that it is no longer bearable. Ad vocem[8] Hegel, the fellow glosses: known to the general public as the discoverer (!) and glorifier (!!) of the royal Prussian state concept (!!!). I have retorted to him suitably, and have sent him, for publication, a declaration as mild as was possible under the circumstances. This dunderhead, who has been jogging around helplessly for years on the ridiculous contradiction between right and might, like an infantry man placed upon a horse with the staggers and locked in the riding-school—this ignoramus has the insolence to wish to dispatch a man like Hegel with the word 'Preuss'[9] and, at the same time, suggests to the public that I had said it. I have now had enough of the whole thing. If Wilhelm doesn't publish my declaration, I shall turn to his superiors, the 'Committee',[10] and if they also get up to tricks, I shall prohibit any further publication. I would rather not be published than let Wilhelm proclaim me a jackass thereby.[11]

Borkheim, returned enclosed. The fellow is gracious enough to wish to find Lever[12] jocose. 'Boquillon'[13] is very nice; I haven't yet read the other things.

I can tell you nothing about Schapper[14] that you do not know yourself or you could not get much better from Pfänder.

The Kölnische Zeitung has been gammoned into writing that the floor of the Atlantic Ocean is covered with protoplasm—'a moving slime that nourishes itself.'[15]

In LONDON CLAY, Owen has found the skull of a giant bird, similar to the great wingless birds of New Zealand.

The jolliest point about old Irish law[16] is the family law. Those must have been free-and-easy times. Polygamy existed, was at least tolerated, and the concubines here were divided into 6-7 classes, including one, the imris, 'WHOM HE (THE MAN) HAS WITH THE CONSENT OF HER HUSBAND'. Very naive, too, is the regulation about the disposition of property. If they both have the same amount, the husband and (the first or main) wife dispose of it jointly. If the husband has everything and the wife nothing, the husband disposes. Has the wife all and the husband nothing, then 'the wife takes the position of the husband, and the husband that of the wife'. Yet still more civilised than the modern English laws.

The legal position of hommes entretenus[17] is also defined. Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

Don't talk about grey hairs. They are growing thickly enough in my beard, but the corresponding dignitas simply won't appear.

  1. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Selected Letters. The Personal Correspondence, 1844-1877, Ed. by F. J. Raddatz, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Toronto, 1981.
  2. ↑ Engels is referring to preparations for the so-called plebiscite which Napoleon III hoped to use to consolidate his somewhat shaky position. On 20 April 1870, the government made public a new constitution which was a compromise between the authoritarian and the parliamentary systems. It was followed by a decree on 23 April, which proposed that the French people use the plebiscite to approve or reject the following: 'The People approves the liberal reforms effected in the Constitution since 1860 by the Emperor, with the cooperation of the great bodies of the State, and ratifies the Senatus-Consultus of the 20th April 1870.' The issue was worded in such a way that a positive answer to it would sound like an approval of the overall political structure of the Second Empire. As a result of a plebiscite held on 8 May 1870, about 3.5 million citizens in fact opposed the Empire (1,894,681 abstained, and 1,577,939 voted against). A large share of the votes against the Empire belonged to the French army; in Paris alone, 46,000 servicemen gave a negative answer.
  3. ↑ See this volume, pp. 504-06.
  4. ↑ Н. Флеровский, Положение рабочаго класса въ Россіи.
  5. ↑ A reference to Kolokol, the Russian revolutionary democratic newspaper edited by Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev. It was published in Russian in 1857-67, and in French with Russian supplements in 1868-70, in London up to 1865 and later in Geneva. After Herzen's death in 1870, an attempt to keep up the newspaper was made by Sergei Nechayev, who was in close contact with Bakunin. This is probably what Marx means. Six issues appeared in April-May 1870.
  6. ↑ Wilhelm Liebknecht
  7. ↑ F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany.
  8. ↑ Regarding
  9. ↑ disparaging form of 'Prussian'
  10. ↑ to the Brunswick Committee of the Social Democratic Workers' Party
  11. ↑ On 2 April 1870, Der Volksstaat, edited by Liebknecht, began the publication of Engels' work The Peasant War in Germany. A serious blunder was made by the editorial board when printing Chapter II: on 4 May, the newspaper featured the end of this chapter, while the preceding page had been left out and appeared only on 7 May with the editorial board's note: 'The excerpt contained in today's issue was to have appeared before the part published in the last issue. This vexing error was caused by the absence of our type-setter who is responsible for imposing the issue (this type-setter is away on an agitation tour).'
    Engels is referring to Liebknecht's footnote on Hegel that appeared in Der Volksstaat on 30 April 1870.
  12. ↑ Ch. Lever, Harry Lorrequer. See this volume, p. 507.
  13. ↑ A. Humbert, Le Plébiscite de boquillon.
  14. ↑ Ibid.
  15. ↑ 'Die Tiefsee Untersuchungen', Kölnische Zeitung, No. 122, 3 May 1870.
  16. ↑ Brehon Law, the general name of the Celtic common law code, took its name from the Brehons, judges in Celtic Ireland. The laws operated in Ireland until 1605, when they were repealed by the British Government. Their publication was started by the Brehon Law Commission set up by the British Government in 1852. The first three volumes of the Ancient Laws of Ireland appeared in 1865, 1869 and 1873 and made up the collection The Senchus Mor, or Great Old Law Book. The publication continued up to 1901.
  17. ↑ kept men