| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 22 November 1882 |
ENGELS TO MARX
IN VENTNOR
London, 22 November 1882
Dear Moor,
You will have received my letter of yesterday's date, with CHEQUE for £30.
Hartmann[1] was here on Sunday evening in a state of intense inventor's euphoria. His cell has been in action since Friday, operating a galvanometer with high resistance which at first registered more than 50° and is now steady at 46°. It would, he said, continue to run smoothly without further attention not just for three, but actually for six months or even a year. However, he had no intention of showing it to buyers because of as yet unpatented improvements. So my intervention was again required. I firmly refused and arranged for the matter — a perfectly simple one that presents no real difficulty— to be settled by Percy[2] (which it has), advising him [Hartmann] in future to supply his English buyers with the article he had sold them and not something else, either better or worse. Whether it will do any good is another question. The chap's a fanatical worker; work and fanaticism are wearing him out; the only sleep he gets is between 3 and 5 in the morning, and he looks ghastly but is correspondingly well turned out and every time he comes here he is wearing a different suit. One of his new patent improvements is as follows: To protect the cell's caustic potash, KOH, against the carbonic acid in the air, and to prevent it turning into potassium carbonate, he poured oil onto the solution and, according to Percy, simply couldn't understand why this failed to do the trick, the combination of fat and alkali forming instead something that looked like soap and, indeed, was soap!
I have recently obtained SECONDHAND what I have long been looking for — a complete bound edition of Geschichtschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit, and guess from the sale of whose library it had come? — Dr Strousberg's! I found therein a passage in Plutarch's Marius which, seen in conjunction with Caesar and Tacitus,[3] explains the entire agrarian structure.
The Cimbri 'had migrated, but not, as it were, all at one go, or in a regular stream; rather, they had always pushed on, year after year, during the good season and in this way had, over a long period, fought and battled their way across the Continent'.[4]
This passage, seen in conjunction with the Suebi's annual move to new lands, as described 70 years later by Caesar, reveals the manner in which the Germanic migrations took place. Where they spent the winter, there they would sow in the spring and, having reaped, would move on until winter brought them to a halt again. That they regularly tilled the land in summer (if they did not engage in rapine instead) can be assumed with some certainty in the case of peoples who had brought agriculture with them from Asia. In the case of the Cimbri, the process of migration is still in evidence; in Caesar it comes to an end, the Rhine forming an impassable frontier. Together, these two manifestations explain why, in Caesar, privati ac separati agri apud eos nihil est[5] : migration means that collective cultivation was only possible by kinship community, and to pace out individual fields would have been absurd. In Tacitus, the step forward — or, perhaps, back—to individual cultivation within the framework of common ownership has been made.
Tussy has sent me by hand various newspapers for onward transmission to you; with them, I enclose an Egalité. The Egalité's impertinence would really seem to have made an impression on the Parquet; the addresses are still written in Lafargue's hand.
Kindest regards.
Your
F.E.