| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 16 May 1882 |
ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL
IN LEIPZIG
London, 16 May 1882
Dear Bebel,
I have been long meaning to write to you. Particularly since I don't know whether Marx has answered your last letter.[1] He several times promised me that he would, but you know how it is when one is ill. So today I have at last got round to it.
Marx first went to the Isle of Wight,[2] but the weather there was cold and wet. Then to Algiers via Paris. Caught cold again during the journey, encountering more wet, chilly weather in Algiers, later succeeded by rapid variations in temperature. Once again his cold assumed the form of pleurisy, less severe than his first attack here, but long drawn-out. Now he is thoroughly recovered and, since it has at last got really hot in Africa, has fled to Monte Carlo, the gaming establishment of the Prince of Monaco.2 As soon as the summer has really begun, he will leave and join Madame Longuet and her children on the Normandy coast; is unlikely to be back before the beginning of July. All he has got to do now is shake off once and for all his obstinate cough, and in this he will probably succeed. He had his photograph taken in Algiers and is looking quite his old self again.
It is a great misfortune that you, of all people, should have suffered defeat in elections which otherwise went off so splendidly.[3] Your presence was doubly necessary in view of the many new, and in some cases unreliable, elements that have got in. Indeed it would seem that, at the start, a number of not very edifying blunders were perpetrated. Now things seem to be going rather better. I was therefore doubly delighted (and Marx no less so) by the courageous attitude of the Sozialdemokrat, which did not hesitate to come out unequivocally against the whining and pusillanimity of Breuel & Co., even when deputies such as Bios and Geiser came out in favour of it.3 We, too, were appealed to, and Viereck wrote me a very pathetic letter about the paper whereat I informed him of my view in altogether amiable if no uncertain terms[4] and, since that time, have heard nothing more of him. Hepner, too, has passed this way, 'sick at heart and poor of purse'[5] and terribly sorry for himself; he had written a very indifferent little pamphlet from which I could see how greatly he had deteriorated morally. The chief plaint in both cases was that the Sozialdemokrat failed to take account of the laws presently in force in Germany, the contents of the paper being such that its distributors were had up by the German courts for lèse majesté, high treason, etc. Yet it is perfectly evident from the paper itself and the reports of the proceedings against our people that, whatever the circumstances, and no matter how the paper was written, those swine on the bench would find some pretext for committing them. To write a paper in such a way as to afford no handle to the said judges is an art that has yet to be discovered. And, what is more, these gentlemen forget that an organ as weak-kneed as they desire would drive our people pretty well en masse into Most's camp. However, I shall none the less advise Bernstein,h to whom we have otherwise lent our moral support whenever possible, to modulate the tone of moral indignation a bit by the use of irony and derision, for such a tone, if it is not to become boring, has to be so stepped up as ultimately to become ridiculous.
Singer came to see me the day before yesterday and from him I learned that the forwarding address is still all right, something I was not quite sure about since we haven't used it for so long. He has another drawback. He belongs to those who regard the nationalisation of anything as a semi-, or at all events pre-, socialist measure and are therefore secret devotees of protective tariffs, tobacco monopoly, nationalised railways, etc. These prevarications are the legacy of the unduly one-sided fight against Manchesterism and, because they facilitate debate in a middle-class and 'eddicated' environment, enjoy a considerable following particularly among those bourgeois and academic elements who have come over to us. You in Berlin, he tells me, recently debated the point, he being luckily outvoted. We cannot, for the sake of such minor considerations, afford to discredit ourselves either politically or economically. I tried to make him see that in our view 1. protective tariffs are quite the wrong thing for Germany (not, however, for America), because our industry has expanded and become a viable exporter under free trade, but for it to be a viable exporter, competition from foreign semi-manufactures on the home market is absolutely essential; that the iron industry, which produces 4 times more than is required by the home market, uses the protective tariff only against the home market while selling abroad, as the facts go to show, at give-away prices; 2. that the tobacco monopoly is nationalisation on so minute a scale that it can't even do duty for an example in the debate nor, for that matter, do I give a damn whether or not Bismarck puts it into effect since either way it must eventually redound to our benefit; 3. that the nationalisation of railways is of benefit only to the shareholders who sell their shares above value, but of no benefit at all to us because we should be able to deal as summarily with one or two big companies as with the state, once we had the latter; that the joint-stock companies have already provided proof of the extent to which the bourgeois as such is redundant, in as much as the management is wholly in the hands of salaried officials, nor would nationalisation provide any further argument. However, he had got the thing too firmly fixed in his mind and agreed with me only to the extent of admitting that, from a political viewpoint, your dismissive attitude was the only correct one.
Time for the post. Kindest regards to yourself and Liebknecht.
Your
F.E.