newspaper you think best.[1] If, as a party, we make no effort to be quick off the mark, we shall always arrive post festum.[2]
Few mortals, other than yourself, can boast of having received letters from me on 4 successive mail days; but I was anxious to show Papa Lupus which of us two is the more punctilious...
- ↑ The reference is to the first of the two satirical poems by Freiligrath written on Marx's request specially for Die Revolution on 16 and 23 January 1852. The poet ridiculed the so-called German-American loan which Kinkel tried to raise in the USA (see Note 27). Kinkel's activity in America was described by Cluss in his letters to Wilhelm Wolff of 4-6 November and to Marx in mid-December 1851. Freiligrath's poems were published in German in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser, Nos. 10 and 27, 7 March and 4 July 1852, printed in Stuttgart and Tübingen. The first poem was also published in English in Notes to the People, No. 50, 10 April 1852. Both the Morgenblatt and Notes to the People carried an introduction, the contents of which were not identical in the two publications. The editors of the present edition have insufficient proof that it was Marx who wrote this introduction, though Freiligrath is known to have asked him to do so (Freiligraths Briefwechsel mit Marx und Engels, Berlin, 1968, Bd. I, S. 42-43). In America the first poem was published by Cluss in English in the newspaper The National Era, No. 282, 27 May 1852 (reproduced from the Notes to the People) with additions to the introduction made by Cluss, relating it to conditions in America. Die Revolution did not publish the poems until June 1852
- ↑ after the event