Letter to Hermann Schluter, March 12, 1886

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 12 March 1886


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVII, Moscow, 1935
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO HERMANN SCHLÜTER

IN HOTTINGEN-ZURICH

London, 12 March[1] 1886

Dear Mr Schlüter,

If I am to send you a speedy reply, I shall have to be brief.

1) The man with the money has not yet turned up. 2) We have Lexis[2] here. Thanks for the hint.

3) Origin.[3] This business of the '2nd edition' has its dubious aspects, but when I consider that the two markets are completely different and that the '1st edition' is therefore unlikely to get in the way of the '2nd', it's unlikely to do much harm. 555 Admittedly I should have been happier had Dietz consulted us first. He has behaved very arbitrarily in the past over other matters. This time it was quite unnecessary; he could, e. g., easily have informed me about the matter through Kautsky. But he likes faits accomplis and I shall get someone to tell him as much.

4) Reports of the International.[4] I was in Manchester at the time and can't really remember the details. The General Council did, at any rate, send a MESSAGE to all the congresses, but Marx's papers and pamphlets are all of them still in the unsorted state they were in when I lugged them over here and it will take about 6 weeks to put them in order. However I've asked Kautsky to make inquiries from Lessner; I should be very surprised if he hasn't collected everything.

5) Stephens' Speech. 557 Yes, the thing is by Weerth. As to the introduction, I shall be glad to go through your ms. But here too there are few sources and the bourgeois have been responsible for some serious falsification. Last year Harney scoured the whole of Yorkshire, Lancashire and London for one copy of The Northern Star, the paper which he had edited and which had had a circulation of 100,000 copies. In vain. Evanescence — such is the curse that afflicts all proletarian literature not included in official literature. Thus Owen's works are nowhere to be had and the BRITISH MUSEUM would pay a great deal of money for a complete collection. A genuine account will therefore be difficult. The Brentanos and Co. know nothing. The Charter was drawn up in 1835, not 1838, and O'Connell[5] was also involved if I'm not mistaken. What Brentano says about the petition is utter nonsense[6] ; after 10 April the bourgeois of both parties stuck together and in such a case lies are always disseminated, it being impossible to refute them either in Parliament or in the press. Even if a House of Commons Committee did scrutinise the petition (which I very much doubt), it would have been quite incapable of distinguishing the genuine from the bogus. 558 But in the spring of 1848, no one was able to take much interest in such dirty goings-on; there were other things to do. Besides, we weren't in England.

With kindest regards,

Yours,

F. Engels

  1. ↑ May in the original.
  2. ↑ W. Lexis, 'Die Marx'sche Kapital théorie', Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Vol. 11, Jena, 1885.
  3. ↑ F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
  4. ↑ Hermann Schlüter intended to publish as a separate volume the reports of the General Council to the congresses of the International Working Men's Association and therefore enquired of Engels when and where they had been printed. He further informed him that 'a translation into Armenian of Marx's Wage Labour and Capital recently appeared in Constantinople'.
  5. ↑ O'Connel in the original.
  6. ↑ L. Brentano, 'Die englische Chartistenbewegung', Preußische Jahrbücher, Nos. 5, 6, Berlin, 1874.