Letter to Karl Marx, November 11, 1882

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 11 November 1882


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 4, Berlin, 1931
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46


ENGELS TO MARX

IN VENTNOR

London, 11 November 1882

Dear Moor,

I was able to show Tussy your letter[1] on the evening it arrived, for in the morning Lenchen and Johnny had gone to Percy's[2] OFFICE to watch the LORD MAYORS SHOW and in the evening we all foregathered at Pumps's for DINNER. Johnny was very charming and Pumps's gosling very well-behaved.

I am very glad you should have found a pleasant doctor0; it is always better if a convalescent has someone like that at hand, and what good can it do if every trifle must first be referred back here? I trust the rheumatism and cough are now on the mend.

Today I am sending you 2 Egalités and one weekly ditto. The manifesto of the (Lyons) Conseil national4 3 5 will convince you that the Lyonnais are still the typical louts they have always been. No further news about the progress of the negotiations with the Parisian capitalist, so nothing would appear to have been settled yet.

The rudeness with which Dilke replies to awkward questions4 3 6 is indeed striking, but seems very much to the taste of the bunch of liberal parvenus who sit behind him. Well, they'll feel the cloture[3] soon enough. The business in Gibraltar4 ' 2 stinks more every day; the extradition was ordered, not only by the police, but also by a magistrate, i. e. a. judge, and the Governor reads about it in the paper and doesn't lift a finger! Meanwhile the Russians are encroaching more and more on Persia and Afghanistan and building roads to Meshed in Persia and from Samarkand via Bukhara to Balkh (the Bactria of the Ancients) in Afghanistan, while their intrigues in Turkey are such that not even Aleko Pasha, their protégé in East Rumelia, can swallow them. But neither big Gladstone nor little Dilke have any eyes for this. The Russians certainly have something in mind for next spring. But the kind of credit they enjoy will be evident to you from the announcement of the Poti-Baku Railway's Preference Loan. They have to use a company as a cloak and, moreover, on what terms!

Vollmar has opened his pro-Malon campaign in the Sozialdemokrat— Malon's promptings being instantly recognisable in the saccharine tone of the apologia with which the article concludes.[4]

But what do you think of Wilhelm'sb panegyric of Bennigsen in the Justice? It's really laid on a bit thick, even for the worthy Wilhelm.

The Swiss Factory Act 4 0 3 also goes off in today's parcel. I shall ask Bernstein for Oldenburg's articlec at the earliest opportunity. Bernstein will probably think twice before writing to me; I made such good use of his own arguments to refute his conclusions concerning the French business that he is unlikely to find very much more to say.[5]

Now, with the closure of the debate, the House of Commons has sunk wholly to the level of a continental Chamber which, in view of its present composition, is the position best suited to it.

I am very curious to hear more about the experiment made by Deprez at Munich.[6] However, I completely fail to understand how, in that case, laws for estimating resistance in wires hitherto regarded as valid and still applied in practice by engineers (in their calculations) can continue in force. Hitherto it has heen calculated that, given the same conductive material, resistance increases in proportion as the diameter of the conducting wire decreases. I wish Longuet could be induced to cough up those things. For this means that the vast and hitherto untapped sources of hydraulic power have suddenly become exploitable.

But now I must pack up the papers. All well here.

Your

F.E.

  1. ↑ This letter from Marx to George Moore, like that of 28 March, dealt with the business of the firm holding a patent for engraving work; the partners were Paul Lafargue, Benjamin Le Moussu and George Moore. In late summer 1873, Lafargue withdrew from the firm and Marx took his place. The firm fell apart in the spring of 1874.
  2. ↑ 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).
  3. ↑ Marx (accompanied by his daughter Eleanor) took a cure at Karlsbad from 19 August to 21 September 1874. Having returned to London on 3 October, he resumed work on the French translation of the first volume of Capital and finished editing the last instalments in late January 1875 (see this volume, pp. 55-56).
  4. ↑ In the late 1850s, the Mexican government of Zuloaga and Miramön issued state bonds that became an object of large-scale speculation in France (see present edition, Vol. 19, p. 197).
  5. ↑ Ibid., pp. 354 57, 360 62.
  6. ↑ On 18 September 1878, The Standard, No. 16897, carried an article covering the debate on the Anti-Socialist Bill that had begun in the Reichstag on 16 September. Further on, Engels is referring to the telegraphic communication in the same issue of the newspaper: 'The German Parliament. The Anti-Socialist Bill. Speech of Prince Bismarck' dealing with the Reichstag sitting of 17 September.