Letter to Eduard Bernstein, October 27, 1882

ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN

IN ZURICH

London, 27 October 1882

Dear Mr Bernstein,

In great haste the finale of the Paris affair, for I can hardly suppose the Parisians send you these things — even we over here have to extract them from the chaps by force.

Well, the Citoyen continued to appear under its old editors, while Lissagaray edited Le Citoyen et la Bataille with the aid of two anarchists, Mais and Crié. On Friday evening Citoyen et Bataille made an attempt to have the Citoyen confiscated (by the police) on account of a Wanda Kryloff feuilleton, whereupon the proprietor of the old Citoyen, Blommestein, a Dutch financier and now Lissagaray's associé,^[1] asserted his proprietorial rights. Having been warned in good time, they removed the feuilleton, and the police inspector who came to confiscate it had to go away discomfited. On Sunday, the editors of the Citojen et Bataille declared that, should further attempts be made to confiscate the Citoyen, they would resign en masse (all 3 of them). That same evening, Sunday, the Citoyen des deux mondes, as it had been called on legal advice, was confiscated for bearing an unauthorised title, again at Blommestein's behest. On Monday, i. e. Tuesday morning, it reappeared as the Citoyen international and called upon the editors of the Citoyen et Bataille to stand by their word and resign. Not them! Mais and Crié declared secretly that they at any rate would resign, but did not; Crié was arrested for alleged complicity at Montceau-les-Mines and is now in quod.

In the meantime, since the editors of the Citoyen would have gone in daily fear of its being confiscated unless they changed its name, the paper has, for the past 4 days, been calling itself L'Egalité, alongside which the weekly Egalité is to continue appearing. Where they are getting the money from I don't know; it's 3 weeks since we had any news of the chaps. Nor did we get an Egalité today. But since your Frenchman's génie éminemment organisateur^[2] manifests itself, especially in our friends' case, in organising the most tremendous disorder, one cannot draw any conclusions from that.

The attempt to kill the Citoyen with the help of the judiciary and police has stripped Lissagaray of the last remnants of his disguise. He has combined stupidity and baseness in rare measure.

Marx asks whether you could procure for him a copy of the Swiss Factory Act. We should be greatly obliged if you could let us know in which year the Factory Act now in force in Germany was passed and whether it is a separate Act or part of the Imperial Trade Regulations. We should then be able to get hold of it. Marx needs it for the 3rd edition of Volume I^[3] and promises in return to send you something every now and again for the Sozialdemokrat. In a few days he will be leaving for the Isle of Wight where, provided nothing untoward happens, he will spend the whole winter (5 or 6 hours' journey from here).

Your MISTER Garcia is one of the many little democrats who scurry about London, and have a finger in every association. Their new central boss — or, as Stieber puts it, ringleader, is a BARRISTER called Hyndman, a strongly democratic and ambitious man who unsuccessfully stood for parliament in the recent elections. All these little folk have no one behind them but each other. They split up into all manner of sects and into a befuddled non-sectarian tail consisting of those who hail democracy in whatever guise. They are intent on impressing the world with their own importance. Hence the catalogues of unknown celebrities in Garcia's articles. In most of them there are good intentions and to spare, but likewise the intention to cut a figure. Hence I would advise you to treat the chap's letters with considerable reserve; after all, his principal aim is to elevate to the position of an important party a small clique which has, for twenty years, remained one and the same nonentity, if under various names and in a variety of guises. But, or so it seems to me, the Sozialdemokrat is not there in order to create a continental reputation for these busy nobodies. Herewith the card of one of the little associations of which Garcia is secretary and to which he recently invited me to lecture; I, of course, refused.

I anxiously await the material on Bismarck.^[4] If Marx goes away now, I shall set to work in earnest and, should I become engrossed in a lengthier piece of work^[5] which ought to have been finished long ago, I shall not be able to extricate myself at all quickly, and I should warn you in advance that in that case you will have to wait. If I had got the stuff here, I could start in on it straight away and polish off this business first of all. Bebel promised but didn't send anything and now is actually bound for prison where Liebknecht already is, and there's absolutely no hope of getting anything from the others.

Encl. for Kautsky. Kindest regards,

Yours,

F.E.