| Author(s) | Karl Marx |
|---|---|
| Written | 30 July 1852 |
MARX TO ADOLF CLUSS[1]
IN WASHINGTON
[London, 30 July 1852]
... Huzel's letter 168 was greeted with Homeric laughter. It gave rise to the following intermezzos:
5 Sutton Str., Soho Office of The People's Paper
'To Dr Johann Gottfried Kinkel[2]
'You are alleged, or so I am informed, to have ventured the following statement before Anneke or other Germans at Cincinnati: "Marx and Engels etc." (there follows the treasonable passage). I await your answer by return of post. Silence will be regarded as an admission.
Dr Karl Marx'
This note was kept deliberately vague: 'alleged... Anneke or other Germans', etc. in order to leave Mr Kinkel plenty of latitude for ambiguities. The following reply arrived by return:
1 Henstridge Villas, St. John's Wood, 24th July 1852
To Dr Karl Marx
Since the article about me was published under your auspices during my imprisonment, I have wanted to have nothing more to do with you. If you believe that you can, through the testimony of Anneke or other honourable men, rather than through anonymous insinuations, provide proof that I untruthfully said or published anything detrimental to your own or Mr Engels' honour, I must point out to you, as I would to anyone with whom I have neither personal nor political contacts, the usual way which, under the law, is open to everyone who feels himself insulted or libelled. Except in this way, I shall have no further dealings with you.
Gottfried Kinkel
I have not succeeded in making the final stroke of the pen as in the original. N'est-ce pas[3] very cunning? I am to have recourse to an English court on account of insults offered at Cincinnati. And how coolly everything is rejected that might smack of a duel and the like.
Since I could only assume that the worthy Gottfried Kinkel, who drops the Johann when in public, would refuse to accept further letters bearing a Soho postmark, I hit upon the following ruse. I asked Ernest Jones to write the address and Lupus to post the letter itself in Windsor, where he had business. Inside the envelope, Gottfried found a second little billet-doux, its margin adorned with a posy of forget-me-nots and roses printed in colour and with the following content:
24th July 1852 5 Sutton Str., Soho Office of The People's Paper 'To Dr Johann etc. Kinkel
'In juxtaposition with a written statement, now before me, by your guarantor Huzel, whom at Cincinnati you cravenly required to give his word of honour to keep silent about your mendacious gossip there, a promise which, however, was given only conditionally by Huzel;
'with a letter, likewise before me, written at some time by Dr Gottfried Kinkel in his own hand to his ex-guarantor Cluss,[4] in which the same Kinkel boasts of his intention to enter into political relations with me:
'your letter—and this is precisely why it was provoked—provides a new and striking proof that the said Kinkel is a cleric whose baseness is only equalled by his cowardice.
Dr Karl Marx'[5]
This last was self-complacently pocketed by Mr 'Johann etc.' and is now circulating among the ranks of the emigres. But the cream of the jest will only become plain to Kinkel later on, with the appearance of the first instalment of The Great Men of the Exile. Namely, that, shortly before this fearsome attack on Gottfried, I diverted myself by doing him direct and personal injury, while at the same time justifying myself in the eyes of the émigré louts. To that end I needed something 'in black and white' from Johann etc.
Now for greater matters.— Mazzini, no less, has for the past few days been dashing round like mad in an attempt to bring about an agreement between all those who officially make up the bourgeois emigration here. Also betook himself to Johann etc. And with the following result: Mazzini, Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin and Kinkel constitute Europe's Executive. Each member of this authority has the right to co-opt 2 subjects of his nationality. However, the decision as to these co-options rests with the majority among the four originals, i.e. Mazzini. Accordingly, co-opted among the Germans are A. Ruge and A. Goegg. Who among the other nationalities, I don't yet know. Kinkel, for his part, is said to have laid down 2 conditions: 1. a demand of 20,000 dollars for his loan. This I hold to be a fabrication. 2. The continued and independent existence of the Kinkel-Willich, etc. finance committee. This is no more than formal deference to Willich, for in fact it has already been decided to transfer the entire loan fund to A. Goegg. Finally, Kinkel & Co. will most humbly recognise the Revolutionary League in America. This is the latest turn of events. How far they have progressed towards concluding this important treaty or whether they are still lingering over the preliminaries I do not know. In any case the thing must be noised abroad in America, with particular emphasis on the following. At the last guarantors' meeting in London, in May 1852, when the Kinkel-Willich committee was definitively elected, Kinkel most solemnly declared on his word of honour that if A. Ruge were elected to the committee, he himself would walk out, for he would never serve on the same committee as a man who had publicly described him as an agent of the Prince of Prussia.[7]
Secondly: What will Weitling & Co. say, if the dollars raised in America by Kinkel are expended by the Finance Minister, A. Goegg? For this is what is intended, in order to subsidise 'K. Heinzen's' Janus and to put into circulation the immortal articles of Ruge, Heinzen, etc.
As for Mazzini, this wily enthusiast is steadily descending to the level of an Italian 'Gustav Struve' or some such. For the past 4 years he has been shouting 'Action, action'. Now it so happens that the Austrian police in Italy are running in 600 Mazzinists whose correspondence is conducted on pocket handkerchiefs in invisible ink. But these people have no wish to be detained and their family connections are extensive. So Mr Mazzini has received from Italy a letter announcing their intention to take 'action' in real earnest and hit out. All at once, and post festum,[8] a 'sober reason' stirs in the bosom of the bombastic man of action, and he adjures them for God's sake to lie low, since on their own they can do nothing, the country is swarming with foreign soldiers, and similar loci communes[9] none of which are either more or less true now than they were in 1849. Action, action! Italia farà da sè![10]
A few days ago Lupus met an Italian member of Mazzini's committee and taxed him with most of these absurdities. What of it? retorts the Roman, more than 600 people are killed in a battle. However, since the Italians fear that in this way they will BY AND BY be caught, shot or locked up, and since this or that victim of his exhortations is sending relatives to London, our man of action is afraid that some misunderstanding may lead to his being stabbed by a deluded and frenzied fellow-countryman; so every night he changes his lodgings on the pretext of having to hide from the Austrians. Yet it is not Austrians but 'deluded' Italians from whom he abjectly slinks into hiding. Surely this antipope deserves the gallows? To harass, tease, wear down a nation in this way! The inevitable result, particularly in the case of a people like the Italians, is a state of appalling, passive dejection, of complete and utter collapse.
Our people were to have appeared before the JURY in Cologne yesterday, but suddenly came the announcement of a further adjournment because one of the witnesses for the prosecution, Schulz, a police official in Berlin, had fallen ill. So if Mr Schulz were to die, the defendants might well remain under preliminary investigation until doomsday. In the meantime Becker is going blind and Daniels is getting consumption. C'est par trop infâme.[11] In all this, the bourgeois press is playing a most abominable role.
I saw the notice of adjournment in the Kölnische Zeitung[12] A few days earlier I had received the following report from Cologne[13]
'When Becker was arrested the following letters from you were seized; those of 8.2.51, 21.2.51 and 9.4.51. From the latter the ensuing passages have been picked out by the prosecution as exceptionally incriminating: "Herewith the jolly scribble from the School of Kinkel. 15 shillings have accumulated here f.t.l.[14] 10 shillings are still outstanding, having been promised but not yet collected. I shall proceed in the manner you indicate. So debit me with £1. For owing to the reduced circumstances of the member who should pay it, five shillings cannot be collected." The prosecution makes out that the letters f.t.l. stand for "For the League", while Becker claims that they are an abbreviation indicating an arrangement made between him and yourself concerning the acquisition of cheaper literature for you in London. That passage constitutes one of the chief items in the indictment, since there is otherwise hardly any evidence, unless fabricated, against B. Again, the indictment, starting in the year 1831, traces the rise of the Communist League from an association of Germans in Paris which underwent various modifications under the names "League of Germans",[15] "League of the Just",[16] but continued uninterruptedly right up to the present society now appearing in the dock. This information apparently derives from data provided by the Hanoverian government. The prosecution attaches no importance whatever to the split in London in 1850 l5; in their opinion this was simply a personal squabble, the whole lot of them were, after all, pursuing the same criminal aims and shared the same views and would, moreover, act in concert at the hour of decision. Thus, besides the two addresses previously published in the press, a 3rd has been incorporated in the indictment; this address is said to be dated June or July 1850 17f> and to have been intercepted in Leipzig.
'The only statements of any note are those of the witnesses Haupt, who gave a fairly detailed and comprehensive story, and Hentze, an ex-lieutenant, who to some extent attacked Becker. On Saturday Erhardt, a cashier with Stein, the banker, was arrested on the same charge. He is said to be slightly compromised by reason of the recommendation he gave to Nothjung and of a few letters discovered on the latter which seemed to indicate some understanding between the two... By the way, so nicely have the jurymen been selected that, if you consider the odds, the State could not be better placed.'
The most important news politically is the treaty concluded between Prussia, Austria and Russia during the Czar's[17] visit to Vienna.[18] It was first announced in The Morning Chronicle the day before yesterday. Yesterday there was a reprint of it in The Times,[19] so you will be able to read it for yourself. Here the election results are such that the Tories, who will drop the Corn Law question, possess a large counter-revolutionary majority on all other issues and this Cabinet will, I believe, give way before nothing short of a more or less revolutionary manifestation. The bourgeois now realise what a blunder they made in failing to draw the political conclusions from their anti-Corn Law victory in 1846. Ils y penseront.[20] My list of printing errors for the Brumaire will soon moulder away; had I realised this would happen, I should have done better to send you for postage the money thus expended. But as Spinoza tells us, it is a comfort to consider all things sub specie aeterno[21]