| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 2 February 1892 |
ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL
IN BERLIN
London, 2 February 1892
Dear August,
Am glad you liked the article.[1] I fully approve of the omission of the two names on the second occasion.[2] So far as France was concerned the repetition was necessary; in Germany it might do some harm and is in any case wholly superfluous.
Why, you ask, are the Russians still acting in a warlike manner and concentrating troops in the West? Nothing could be simpler. In my very first letter,[3] in which I maintained that the famine would put paid to Russia's desire for war, I told you that their sabre-rattling, far from ceasing, would tend to grow louder. It's what they always do. But only for the benefit of the public at home and abroad; foreign diplomats are not expected to believe but merely to acquiesce in it. The public is intended to see Russia's retreat as the retreat of the others before Russia.— But this time another factor is involved. The south-east and the east are in a state of famine and cannot provision an army. The area where the harvest has failed is roughly bounded by the line which runs through Odessa, Moscow, Vyatka and Perm up to the Urals, then along this range to the northern extremity of the Caspian, from there to the eastern extremity of the Sea of Azov and back again to Odessa. Proof that only east[4] of the Odessa-Moscow line can large numbers of troops be provisioned; anywhere further north will itself need to be constantly supplied with corn. Besides, the Russians are now disseminating information about the movements of troops to the west that is downright false.
A comment in Sunday's[5] Vorwärts in no way tallies with what you say about your correspondence with Frenchmen regarding Alsace-Lorraine 40 ' and would seem to have been made without reference to you. However you would do well to keep a weather eye on Figaro which is a thoroughly blackguardly paper.
Your conversation with Koller 402 tickled us greatly. That's a typical Prussian for you. Herkner[6] had already dinned into the chaps how short-sighted it was to suck up to the Frenchified and rabidly French notables while antagonising the workers who don't even understand French and who by nature and language are still consummate Germans, thereby driving them into the arms of the Francophils. It would have been a splendid opportunity to practise demagogy from above and with enormous success. The mere imposition of German factory legislation and laws on association, etc., and a tolerant attitude towards the workers would have won them over within 10 years when, along with the Protestants and the wine and tobacco growers, they would have more than counterbalanced the Frenchified middle and lower middle classes and aristocracy. But how could that have been countenanced by the self-same people who were responsible for the Anti-Socialist Law ' ' in Germany and who fought the workers at every turn? The German middle classes, you see, always arrive too late, and not even the Prussian government, which enjoys so much more elbow-room than they, would dare hazard that sort of Bonapartist policy. And as you say, your Prussian bureaucrat, soldier or Junker cannot, by his very nature, voluntarily surrender any position of power, however useless or, indeed, damaging to himself it may be—for would not the policy of petty oppression which is his be-all and end-all suffer in consequence?
As you know, Gilles has at last been well and truly kicked out. But it was silly of the Vorwärts to have suppressed the name in this of all cases.[7] One ought not, after all, to take the shine off one's own achievements by playing them down in a report. And after all the Society[8] and those who induced it to act did at least deserve that an accurate account of what they had done for the party should appear in the official party organ. However, I realise that you can't do anything for the present, but it almost seems to me as though someone was intent on stirring up trouble.
My advising Julius[9] to be less verbose would be about as effective as your advising Liebknecht not to write indiscreet letters. I shall certainly not meddle in Julius' affairs unless absolutely forced to do so. Nor have I any alternative, considering the way the couple has deliberately cut itself off from us. His aunt[10] demands that visit be returned for visit, formal philistine etiquette, but among us communist bohemians that sort ofthing is, first, simply not done and, second, simply impossible. Such philistine intercourse — known here as the SOCIAL TREADMILL — is admissible only for people with too much time on their hands; no one who wishes to work either can or does indulge in that sort ofthing. I never conformed, even amongst the bourgeois in Manchester, and it is more than ever out of the question for me to do so now. Anyone wanting something of someone else goes and sees him, and that's that. But the fact that such is the case is what lies at the bottom of all the trouble in Hugo Road.[11]
I had suspected that Geiser was back at the Vorwärts from the unsurpassed dreariness, tedium and vacuity, for which he alone can be responsible, of certain articles. In other respects the Vorwärts has on occasion been noticeably better during the session of the Dresden Landtag.
Ah yes — the Condition of the Working-Class[12] ! This is the umpteenth time the worthy Dietz has got someone to dun me, only to receive the same answer he has already had from me in writing, namely, that I'll be glad to oblige the moment Volume III of Capital is finished, but can take on absolutely nothing else before then. There are a lot of snags to your proposal that I should authorise him to negotiate with Wigand; hitherto I have always found that in such cases unnecessary and often irreparable mistakes tend to be made. Above all, I have got to know what my legal position is vis-à-vis Wigand. I enclose a résumé of the facts; if, as once before, you could obtain some legal advice as to this, we might resume negotiations. Your previous advice made it perfectly clear to me that, thanks to the lousy Saxon legislation whereby the publisher is protected at the author's expense, I was still very much in Wigand's hands; but what it failed to make clear, since the case did not then arise as now it might, was what my position would be, should Wigand refuse to bring out a new edition on the old terms. If it transpires that I should be as much in his clutches as ever, we shall then certainly'have to see what can be done.[13]
The printers are reaping what they themselves have sown.[14] If it means they are driven to join the party, so much the better.
Yesterday, when I read Prince George of Saxony's Order of the Day,[15] I almost jumped onto the table for joy. How it will enrage the high and mighty! A thing like that, getting into the impious Social-Democratic press! Can it really be that those fellows are already in such close touch with 'my glorious army'? A telegram a column long has already appeared in today's Daily News about it — it will cause the dickens of a sensation all over the world. And they imagine that that kind of treatment will induce the troops to 'shoot down everything in sight', above all their own parents, brothers, etc.! Sont-ils bêtes, ces Prussiens![16]
I am prepared to maintain, envers et contre tous[17] and despite anything that may be said to the contrary, that Louise is a very good housewife and, moreover, an excellent cook. I'm not quite sure that this housewifeliness isn't due in part to the fact of our not being married and, should this prove to be the case, it would be lucky for me because of the circumstance that the difference in our ages precludes marital no less than extra-marital relations, so that nothing remains but that self-same housewifeliness.
Warm regards to your wife and yourself from Louise and
Your
F. E.
Postscript. Louise is indignant because you reply to the letters she writes with six-page letters to me. I told her to write and tell you so herself, to which she replied that she was far too indignant to do any such thing.
Herewith Gilles' latest masterpiece. The Society over here is distributing it by the hundred in the hope that it will prove his own undoing.