Letter to Friedrich Engels, December 17, 1867

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 17 December 1867


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 3, Stuttgart, 1913
Printed according to the original
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 42


MARX TO ENGELS662

IN MANCHESTER

London, 17 December 1867

Dear FRED,

Wilhelm[1] returned enclosed. You must be careful in your reply. The position is difficult. To pursue an entirely correct course would require a much more critical spirit and dialectical skill than our Wilhelm possesses.[2] We can only restrain him from committing really grave blunders. In general, hostility to Prussia is the pathos to which alone he owes his VERVE AND SINGLENESS OF PURPOSE. He has rightly sensed that the true bourgeoisie forms the core of the 'National Liberals',[3] which gives him the opportunity to bestow on his political antipathy the more elevated sanction of economics. Ira facit poetam[4] and also gives our Wilhelmchen cunning up TO A CERTAIN POINT.

The correspondent of The Irishman here is willing to print, if you write it in English, a critique of the book[5] about one column in length (Ireland must take the proper role in it, however) in that Dublin paper as a contribution under his own name. I shall send you a few copies of the paper and you will see what needs to be done.

The Zukunft has a talent for misprints[6] which is all the odder as Dr Guido Weiss does after all have the original.

I have a small but infinitely irritating carbuncle on my left buttock.

And if the noble fellow has no bum. On what does he propose to sit?[7]

Yesterday I gave a 1 V2 hour lecture on Ireland[8] at our German Workers' Society (though a further 3 German workers' societies were represented, ABOUT 100 people in all), as 'standing' is the easiest posture for me just now.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ Liebknecht
  2. ↑ Engels' letter to Liebknecht mentioned here has not been found. In his reply to this letter of 11 December 1867, Liebknecht said that he agreed with Engels' remarks on the policy pursued by the working-class representatives in Germany but that he had a different opinion on individual practical questions of agitation. In particular, he explained the reason for the address that he and Bebel had sent to the Vienna City Council by their confidence that Austria was on the eve of a revolution ('She has to experience her own 1789'), which was to have an impact on the whole of Germany.
  3. ↑ From 13 September 1867, Marx and Paul Lafargue stayed for a few days with Engels in Manchester.
  4. ↑ Anger makes the poet (Juvenal, Satires, I, 79).
  5. ↑ the first volume of Capital
  6. ↑ when it published Marx's article 'Plagiarism'
  7. ↑ J. W. Goethe, 'Totalität'.
  8. ↑ A reference to Marx's report on the Irish question which he made on 16 December 1867 at a meeting of the German Workers' Educational Society in London (see Note 150); the meeting was also attended by members of other workers' societies of London as well as some members of the General Council. A detailed outline of the report which was written by Marx and a brief handwritten record of it by Eccarius (see present edition, Vol. 21) have come down to us.