Letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht, March 14, 1883

ENGELS TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

IN LEIPZIG

London, 14 March 1883

Dear Liebknecht,

You will all have learned from my telegram to Mrs Bebel — the only address I have got — of the terrible loss suffered by the European socialist revolutionary party. Only last Friday the doctor^[1] — one of the leading medical men in London — had told us that there was every prospect of getting him as well as he had ever been, provided only he sustained his strength by taking food. And from that very moment he began eating with a better appetite again. Then, just after two o'clock this afternoon, I found the household in tears and was told he was terribly weak; Lenchen called out to me to come upstairs, saying he was half asleep, and, when I got there — she had been out of the room for barely two minutes — he was sound asleep, but it was for ever. The greatest intellect of the second half of this century had ceased to think. What the immediate cause of death was, I would not venture to guess without medical advice, the whole case being so complex as to require pages if it were to be described adequately, even by a doctor. And, indeed, it is no longer of any real importance. I have suffered anxiety enough over the past six weeks, and all I can say is that, in my opinion, the death, first of his wife, and then, in a most critical period, of Jenny, helped to bring on the final crisis.

Although I have seen him this evening laid out on his bed, his features rigid in death, I simply cannot conceive that this man of genius has ceased to fructify the proletarian movement of both worlds with his stupendous ideas. We all of us are what we are because of him; and the movement is what it is today because of his theoretical and practical activities; but for him we should still be in a welter of confusion.

Your

F. Engels