Letter to Friedrich Engels, September 18, 1878

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 18 September 1878


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart 1913
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO ENGELS

IN LITTLEHAMPTON

[London,] 18 September 1878

DEAR FRED,

ALL RIGHT. Herewith a letter from Kaub, which please be good enough to return as I have not yet answered it. Hirsch has behaved like a fool during his stay in Paris and seems to be intent on achieving martyrdom. Incidentally, the goings-on in Paris patently show how right you were to warn me against making a pilgrimage to that city.

A fine republic, to let itself be ordered about by Messrs Bismarck and Stieber! Last night Barry came to see me. The Lausanne congress did not take place, as he learnt while still in Paris where he therefore remained. It was simply as REPORTERS that Hirsch and he went to the meeting, but the latter had already been dispersed, and those attending it taken into custody; Hirsch was not arrested until later that night, in his own house.[1] The next day the IRREPRESSIBLE Barry presented himself at the police headquarters (with the moral support of documents showing him to be correspondent of The Standard and a contributor to The Whitehall Review). There he saw a subordinate official to whom he applied for permission to see 'his friends', Hirsch and Guesde. At this he was given the addresses of the two police officers who had arrested Hirsch and Guesde. Both were outraged by the cheek of this ENGLISH bifstek, and ended up by pushing him out of the office.

Barry, undismayed, returned to the police headquarters where he managed to penetrate as far as the great Gigot. After exchanging a few words with big Barry, this 'POLITE' policeman asserted that he didn't speak enough English or Barry sufficient French; so rang for an interpreter. Substance of the conversation: that what Barry said about Hirsch's non-participation should be told to the examining magistrate, not the Prefect of Police; that the arrest was 'legal', etc. At which Barry: IT MIGHT BE LEGAL IN FRANCE FOR OUGHT HE KNEW, BUT IT WOULD NOT BE so IN ENGLAND. At which Gigot, with solemn pathos: Les étrangers qui viennent chez nous, etc., doivent se soumettre aux lois de la Ré-pu-bli-que frrrançaise?[2] Whereat THE BRAZEN Barry, SHAKING HIS HAT, rejoined: Vive la République! This last exclamation brought the blood to Gigot's face, and he gave Barry to understand that he had no wish to exchange political ideas with him, etc. This time, however, Barry was merely bowed politely out of the room.

He has—vis-à-vis myself—put the lid on what was, on that occasion, amusing effrontery on his part. For he told me that he was going to spend another week at Hastings with his family and now I would doubtless have the time to get together for him material for articles (in The Nineteenth Century). He might well, in making this fresh onslaught, have fared worse than in the dens of the two French police officers.

Once again, Levy's paper[3] has shown itself to be the most shameless in London. In today's leading article he tells his readers that Reichensperger, speaking for the 'Centre',[4] came out in favour of the Bill[5] (for such was the interpretation put by Levy on the news sent him by his reptile[6] correspondent in Berlin), and Bismarck's majority was assured. By the by, even Levy, whatever his admiration for the GREAT CHANCELLOR, must needs confess that the great man HAD RATHER THE WORSE of it in his verbal encounter with the 'brilliant' Bebel.[7]

The only one of Utin's pamphlets I have yet looked at is that by Adolph Samter (Die Reform des Geldwesens); the following is a SAMPLE of how he quotes (he often quotes me, but paraphrases more often still; all the pamphlet boils down to is the silly notion of introducing, in place of the bank note, a 'commodity note', something which had, to all intents and purposes, been introduced in 1848 with the Prussian government's loan bank notes). I say: 'Although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver, etc.'[8] ; he, citing the correct page number, gives as a quotation: 'Gold and silver is by its nature money. Marx, etc.'[9] The art of reading would appear to be increasingly on the wane among the 'educated' estates in Germany. In the case of the said Samter, the nonsensical and ungrammatical quotation doesn't even conceal an evil intent. Thus he gives as a quotation from Petty, 'Labour is the father, nature the mother of material wealth', because when speaking of 'material' wealth, I said that in this case Petty's words were appropriate, etc.

Apropos. Our FAT BOY, Kovalevsky, came across Ralston again in Switzerland and was immediately asked whether he knew the Russian socialist who had described him (Ralston) in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Zeitung as a HUMBUG, COWARD, etc. (The article was written by my wife[10] ). Kovalevsky, though he had some inkling of its provenance, answered truthfully that he knew of no such Russian. However, since that time Ralston (with whom he is again saddled over here) has become far less confiding. (The article in the above-mentioned feuilleton referred to a nasty piece of twaddle Ralston wrote on the subject of 'RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY LITERATURE'.)[11]

Yesterday Mr Montefiore jun. came to see me; is going to Berlin; and, in a manner altogether typical of a young English man of letters, especially in London, said to Tussy: 'If only the Prussians would do me the kindness of arresting me for a day or two! What splendid material it would provide for an article in a review or a LETTER TO The Times!

I went to your house and have sent off to you the letter I found there.

Adio.

Your

Moor

  1. ↑ The second French workers' congress held in Lyons on 28 January-8 February 1878 decided that an international socialist congress would be held in Paris in September, during the world industrial exhibition. Its convocation was initiated first and foremost by Jules Guesde. The French government banned the congress, but on 4 September the delegates assembled in Paris met unofficially, since it was already too late to try and convene a congress in Lausanne. The police dispersed the participants and arrested 38 people, Guesde among them. They appeared in court on 24 October. Carl Hirsch, who was present at the meeting as a reporter, was arrested on 6 September, kept in custody until 9 October, and then deported.
  2. ↑ Foreigners who visit our country, etc., must submit to the laws of the Frrrench Re pu blic.
  3. ↑ The Daily Telegraph
  4. ↑ The Party of the Centre, a political party of German Catholics, was formed in 1870-71 following the merger of the Catholic groups in the Prussian Landtag and the German Reichstag (the deputies of these parties sat in the centre of the assembly hall). The Party of the Centre normally took a non-committal approach, manoeuvring between the pro-government parties and the left opposition in the Reichstag. It united different social sections among the Catholic clergy, landowners, bourgeois and part of the peasantry (mostly in small and medium states in Western and South-Western Germany), and supported their separatist and anti-Prussian leanings. Although in opposition to the Bismarck government, the Party of the Centre nevertheless voted for its repressive measures against the working-class and socialist movement. Engels described it in detail in his essays 'The Role of Force in History' (see present edition, Vol. 26) and 'What Now?' (Vol. 27).
  5. ↑ A reference to the Anti-Socialist Law. The discussion of the bill began in the Reichstag on 16 September 1878.
  6. ↑ The reptile fund—the special fund at Bismarck's disposal for bribing the press and individual journalists. Reptiles was the name used by the left-wing press to designate periodicals which defended the interests of the government and had been bribed by it.
  7. ↑ In his speech to the Reichstag on 16 September 1878, August Bebel refuted the groundless accusations against the Social-Democrats which had given Bismarck a pretext to introduce the Anti-Socialist Bill. He noted that time would show its pointlessness, since the Social-Democrats would be able to disseminate their ideas even working underground.
  8. ↑ K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Part I, Ch. II (present edition, Vol. 35).
  9. ↑ A. Samter, Die Reform des Geldwesens, Berlin, 1869, p. 62.
  10. ↑ [J. Marx,] 'Vom Londoner Theater', Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, 25 May 1877.
  11. ↑ W.R. S. Ralston, 'Russian Revolutionary Literature', The Nineteenth Century, Vol. I. No. 3, May 1877.