| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 28 April 1881 |
ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL
IN LEIPZIG
London, 28 April 1881
Dear Bebel,
In response to your inquiry I asked my source (a stockbroker) whether the person concerned would do better to continue paying the GREAT BRITAIN MUTUAL & Co. (Office 101, Cheapside, it's the same surely? GREAT BRITAIN MUTUAL INSURANCE?) or to stop payment of the calls, and received the reply:
'We fear there is no alternative but to keep on paying the calls as they are made.'[1]
Ede[2] has sent us the stenographic reports of the Reichstag debates on the state of siege and the Accident Insurance Bill. 144 We congratulate you on both your speeches. The one on the Accident Bill pleased us particularly. It strikes the right note — high-minded, yet based on a real knowledge of the facts, and ironically superior. Your criticism of the Bill was all that could have been said or desired. I have been expressly asked to tell you all this on Marx's behalf as well as my own. It was the best speech of yours we have ever read, and the debate gave one the impression that the turner, Bebel, was the only educated man in the whole of the Reichstag.
At the 2nd reading you might possibly include the following: You might perhaps ask us, gentlemen, how we can prevail upon our consciences to grant money to this government, even though it be for the relief of workers who have met with an accident? Gentlemen, after what the Prussian Landtag and you yourselves have done in the matter of subventions, the power of the Reichstag in financial affairs, its ability to wring concessions from the government by virtue of the fact that it holds the purse-strings, has gone by the board. The Reichstag and Landtag have thrown away their entire budgetary authority with nothing to show for it in return, and here it is certainly no longer a case of a paltry million or two.— All those subventions, moreover, were for purposes of exploitation (protective tariffs, purchase of the railways at 30% above their value — Rhenish Rail were standing at less than 120, rose to 150 as a result of the government's offer to purchase, now 160!), and this time it is, after all, at least supposed to be for the workers.
For the rest, the terms of acceptance you proposed fully protect you to your rear.
But what a typically inflated, maliciously stupid, Prussian Junker-cum-bureaucrat Brother von Puttkamer is! 145
Your
F.E.
Marx sends kindest regards. Ede writes to say that he is staying on for the time being.[3]