Letter to Friedrich Engels, May 6, 1862

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 6 May 1862


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 3, Stuttgart, 1913
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41


MARX TO ENGELS[1]

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 6 May [1862]

Dear Frederick,

As soon as you have shown it to Lupus, send back the enclosed, exceedingly odd letter, which was published, although mutilated, in the Siècle, the Temps and the Progrès de Lyon, by the jeunesse hongroise à Paris[2] and sent to me by Schily.[3] This same jeunesse now proposes to let loose a pamphlet containing remarkable revelations about the Kossuth-Klapka-Türr triumvirate in Paris.

Apropos. You might communicate the FACTS contained in the letter to Eichhoff, 57 Ranelagh Street, Liverpool. He can get the thing into the Zeitung für Norddeutschland (Hanover).

A little while ago, so Schily writes, the Bern Bund[4] (mightn't you be able to look this up at the Club?) carried a statement by a Hungarian refugee in which Vogt is called 'the Palais Royal's[5] fattened sow', while Fazy, Kossuth, Klapka, and Türr figure as 'scoundrels and gamblers.'

I have got back 330 copies of Vogt[6] from that blackguard Koller. If only I knew of an opening! Might this not be the moment to dispose of them at a 100 p.c. loss? I. e., in Geneva and Bern. How opportune that would be just now!

I shall send you the April and May numbers of the Press.[7] In future you shall have them regularly. I shall procure the other stuff for you, i.e. the ESTIMATES.

As TO WINE, what the children most prefer, of course, is a motley collection. I believe that, according to Allen, claret and port are best.

I shall write to Dana again. I sorely miss their sending me the Tribune. This is a rotten trick of Greeley's and McElrath's. I discovered two things in the final March numbers of the Tribune. First, that McClellan had been fully informed a week beforehand about the withdrawal of the CONFEDERATES.[8] Secondly, that during the Trent affair,[9] Russell of The Times was taking advantage of what he had ferreted out in Washington in order to gamble on the New York Stock Exchange.[10]

In Prussia, things will get to the point of a coup d'état, not however to a coup d'éclat![11]

The explanation for Bonaparte's present manoeuvres in Mexico[12] (the affair was originally of Pam's contriving) is that Juarez will acknowledge only the official debt of £46,000 to France. But Miramôn and his gang had issued, through the Swiss bankers Jecker et Co., government bonds to the tune of 52,000,000 dollars (on which ABOUT 4 mill, dollars had been paid). These government bonds—Jecker et Co. merely hommes de paille[13] —fell into the hands of Morny et Co. for next to nothing. They are demanding that Juarez acknowledge the same. Hinc illae lacrimae.[14]

Schurz is—a Brigadier-General with Fremont!!!

Your

K. M.

Borkheim paid me the balance last Friday.

  1. ↑ An extract from this letter was first published in English in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the United States, New York, 1937
  2. ↑ young Hungarians in Paris
  3. ↑ On 15 April 1862 Schily sent Marx a letter from Paris including the material on the differences existing among the Hungarian refugee leaders.
  4. ↑ Der Bund. Eidgenössisches Centralblatt. Organ der freisinnig-demokratischen schweizerischen und bernischen Politik
  5. ↑ The Palais Royal in Paris was the residence of Prince Napoleon (Plon-Plon)
  6. ↑ K. Marx, Herr Vogt (see this volume, pp. 327, 337-38, 340).
  7. ↑ The Free Press
  8. ↑ Marx probably has in mind the article 'President Lincoln's Strategy' in the New York Daily Tribune, No. 6542, 24 March 1862.
  9. ↑ The reference is to the detention of the British mail steamer Trent by the Unionist warship San Jacinto on 8 November 1861 and the arrest, aboard the Trent, of James Murray Mason and John Slidell, Confederate emissaries going to Europe on a diplomatic mission. On this see Marx's articles 'The Trent Case', 'The Anglo-American Conflict', 'The News and Its Effect in London' and other relevant items in Vol. 19 of the present edition.
  10. ↑ 'The Censorship of the Press', New York Daily Tribune, No. 6541, 22 March 1862.
  11. ↑ A play on words meaning (here) decisive clash.
  12. ↑ In December 1861 Britain, France and Spain launched an armed intervention in Mexico aimed at overthrowing the progressive Juarez government and turning Mexico into a colony. However, serious differences soon developed between the three powers as a result of which Britain and Spain withdrew their forces in April 1862. The French command refused to negotiate with the Mexican government and opened hostilities on 19 April. In the second half of the year, more French forces were sent to Mexico. For the Bonapartist ruling circles' fraudulent Mexican loan, see Marx's article 'An International Affaire Mires' (present edition, Vol. 19).
  13. ↑ men of straw
  14. ↑ Hence these tears (Terence, Andria, I, i, 99).