Letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, December 15, 1862

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 15 December 1862


First published in the supplement to: Franz Mehring, The Freiligrath-Marx Correspondence, Moscow-Leningrad, 1929 (in Russian)
Printed according to the original
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41


MARX TO FERDINAND FREILIGRATH[1]

IN LONDON

[London,] 15 December 1862

Dear Freiligrath,

The £5 returned herewith 'by hand' with my best thanks. You will excuse its arriving 5 days late. The family in Trier was so taken aback by the sudden and unexpected death of my brother-in-law, R. Schmalhausen, that there was some delay over sending me the money.

I have been spending a few days in Liverpool and Manchester, those centres of cottonocracy and pro-slavery enthusiasm. Among the great bulk of the middle-classes and the aristocracy of those towns you may observe the greatest eclipsus of the human mind ever chronicled in the history of modern times.

I shall drop in at your office for a couple of minutes one of these days, since I also have some literary business to talk over with you.

One of these days, I shall reply to les paroles d'un croyant.[2]

Kindest regards from my family to yours.

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was first published in English in: Karl Marx, On America and the Civil War, New York, 1972.
    From 1858, Marx had had serious differences with Freiligrath over the Vogt affair (see Note 4), the attitude to Kinkel and other matters. In the spring of 1862, following Freiligrath's breach with Kinkel, who had joined the National Association (see Note 24), relations between Marx and Freiligrath began returning to normal.
  2. ↑ words of a believer