Letter to August Bebel, beginning of April, 1891

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written April 1891


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVIII, Moscow, 1940
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL

IN BERLIN

[Draft]

[London, beginning of April 1891]

Dear Bebel,

I shall not get round today to answering your letter of the 30th — that will be done shortly[1] as soon as the present mass of work allows me a free moment; instead I wish to send you and your wife[2] my heartiest congratulations on your silver wedding. I trust that the two of you will still be there to celebrate your golden wedding on 6 April 1916 and, come that day, will drain a glass in memory of the old boy now writing these words, who by then will have long since gone up in smoke and ashes.

One thing I can tell you: there are few people alive today whom I could congratulate with the same sincerity and warmth on the occasion of such an anniversary. Ever since we started corresponding and subsequently struck up a personal acquaintanceship,[3] I have noticed time and again how our lines and mode of thought have coincided to an extent that is literally miraculous between people whose processes of development have been so different. That — I'm glad to say — doesn't preclude our failure to agree on many points. But these again are points where in course of time agreement is automatically reached as a result of discussion or of new events, or else where such agreement eventually ceases to signify. And so I hope it will always remain. I don't believe that a case will ever again arise in which one of us had to take a step immediately affecting the other without first having consulted him.[4] And I, for one, still bless the day when you entered into regular correspondence with me.

  1. ↑ See this volume, pp. 175-84.
  2. ↑ Julie Bebel
  3. ↑ Bebel had corresponded with Engels from May 1873. He first met Marx and Engels in December 1880, when he visited London with Eduard Bernstein and Paul Singer to discuss questions relating to the editing of Sozialdemokrat with them.
  4. ↑ In the ms., the first, deleted version of this sentence reads: 'I don't believe that I shall ever again find myself in the position of taking a step immediately affecting the German party without first having consulted you.'