Letter to Emil Engels Junior, August 20, 1882

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 20 August 1882


First published in the magazine Deutsche Revue, Jg. 46, Bd. 3, 1921
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46


ENGELS TO EMIL ENGELS JUN.

IN ENGELSKIRCHEN

Great Yarmouth, 20 August 1882
10 Columbia Terrace

Dear Emil,

We have been here for the past 10 days,[1] Schorlemmer, Pumps, BABY[2] and I, and the fact that I haven't got round to replying to you until today can be blamed on the sweet indolence of a seaside resort.

First of all, I have written direct to Sam Moore recommending you to him and asking him to send you the address of his office in town (in the case of BARRISTERS these are called CHAMBERS), for I haven't got it here and during the daytime it is, of course, the only place where he can be found. You will find him an exemplary Englishman, possess- ing all the good qualities of his nation and none of the bad. Needless to say he is also a Social Democrat and also speaks German though it's a bit rusty. He will be happy to oblige you in any way, provided it is in his power to do so, and will be of more use to you than I could be. When one has been out of touch with the business world for nearly 13 years and with Manchester for 12,[3] one no longer has much influence over people for whom it is axiomatic that one hand washes the other. Moore, on the other hand, has only been out of touch with it for 3-4 years and still lives in their midst, so in his case it's more likely that something can be arranged. I, for example, don't even know whether the people I used to be connected with are still alive, whether they still own the same business, or whether they may not have sold up entirely. To introduce you to Ermen & Roby would be far more likely to do harm than good; those chaps certainly wouldn't show you their mill and would end up by telling all their other spinning and manufacturing acquaintances on the Exchange to be on their guard against you.

You won't get inside any mills making knitting or sewing yarns, be- cause to my knowledge there are none in Manchester apart from Ermen & Roby. There is a variety of DOUBLERS of SEWINGS where all you will see are the old doubling machines; they sell the yarn untreated. How best to get inside a mill depends upon each particular case; on the whole I have always found that it works best if you make a clean breast of things to the people you've been otherwise recommended to and tell them who you are. To try and get what you want by trickery, as many German spinners have done, nearly always leads to your be- ing found out and denounced to the others on the Exchange, after which you never get to see anything at all. People here compete with one another on a much grander scale than in Germany and the little dodges that are often appropriate enough over there, don't go down at all over here.

Schorlemmer will also be back there at the beginning of October and he, too, will be able to help you. More useful to you than any- thing would be a letter of recommendation from Ermen & Engels to a big German commission house who will surely be able to give you further help and also tell you in which particular instances it might be advisable to keep quiet about what you yourself are.

Well, that's enough for today. The table is about to be laid. Other- wise things are going very well here; the fine weather, Pilsener beer, sea air and sea-bathing have quite driven away the gastric catarrh I had on the Monday of your departure. Pumps and Schorlemmer send you their best wishes.

Your

F. Engels

  1. ↑ Zimnicea (Zimniza), a village in Romania near which the Russian army crossed the Danube in the early morning of 27 (15) June 1877.
  2. ↑ Lilian Rosher
  3. ↑ Following the republicans' overwhelming victory at the elections to the Chamber of Deputies on 14 October 1877 (see Note 283) the Broglie ministry was forced to resign on November 19. The attempt by Mac-Mahon and his followers to effect a coup d'état on 13 December fell through due to the resistance of the junior officer corps and especially the body of privates, who shared the republican leanings of the French peasantry. On 14 December, Jules Dufaure's government was formed. In January 1879, Mac-Mahon was obliged to resign before his term of office had expired. Jules Grévy, a moderate republican, was elected president of the Republic. The bourgeois-republican system was definitively established in France.