Letter to Friedrich Engels, December 9, 1868

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 9 December 1868


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 4, Berlin, 1931
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 43


MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

London, 9 December 1868

DEAR FRED,

BEST THANKS FOR £5. I forgot to enclose the Russian.[1] Follows herewith. In addition Sigfrid Meyex'[2] (The Drury of whom he speaks is a fishy customer who was formerly in London and who wished to push himself onto the CENTRAL COUNCIL. He impressed S. Meyer by his public appearances in New York. Meyer wrote to us that we should really appoint Drury as our agent. I replied to him[3] that Mr Drury had already had himself 'recommended' to us in this capacity by Cremer, Huleck, etc. We did not want him.)

Finally a reappearance CARD from Nincompoop.[4] This letter is very characteristic of him. Schily took him to Lafargue et Co. You know that in Paris you can only move in on the terme[5] Lafargue and Laura thus lived in a chambre garnie,[6] high up, until about a fortnight ago (when they found lodgings, and we sent them their chests and boxes). The first thing Borkheim said when he came to visit them with Schily: 'This has put me quite out of breath. I would not like often to climb so high!' And now his marginal notes, which he sends to me\ Incidentally, he has kept his promise about 'not-climbing'. Lafargue had bought the Ténot,[7] but since the postage to London is dear, Borkheim was supposed to bring the book here on his return journey to Bordeaux. But he was not seen again.

And this reminds me of another anecdote concerning Bork- heim. Shortly before Lafargue left, Borkheim invited him and my family to dinner (Laura did not go). After the 'gentlemen' had retired to Borkheim's STUDY — the gentlemen were Lafargue, Bork- heim and myself—Borkheim related all sorts of gossip told or published by one person or another about me. I let him have his head for a time, while Lafargue rocked crossly backwards and forwards in his chair. Finally I interrupted him and said: It was altogether extraordinary what gossip went round in the world. Engels and I could tell the best stories about this, because we possessed proper archives about the refugees. For instance, when he—Borkheim—came from Switzerland to England, we received a report that he was an agent of the Prussian Count X[8] (I cannot JUST NOW recall the name), who was himself a Prussian spy, and that it had been this count that had sent him to Switzerland, etc. Borkheim exploded like a bomb. 'He had never thought that anybody at all in London knew anything about this story, etc' He then started to tell the story at great length and in great detail and, in his excitement, pumped too much HOT WATER and even more BRANDY into himself. In this OVERWORKED condition we then returned to the ladies for tea, and Borkheim at once burst out with the announcement that I had given him THE MOST STRANGE SURPRISE of his life. He then told the same story three times in succession, to the great annoyance of his wife, since all sorts of females play a role in it. Later he wrote to me twice: I had obviously been joking, he had probably himself told m e the gossip about him, etc. I, however, remained serious. (We had learned about the business from Schily, in one of his letters from Paris, at the time of the Vogt affair.) T h e r e must be punishment!

Apropos. Something that remained a mystery to me for a long time was this: during the 3 years of the cotton FAMINE, where did the English get all that cotton, even for the DIMINISHED SCALE OF PRODUCTION?[9] It was impossible to explain this from the official statistics. Despite all the imports from India, etc., there was seen to be quite an enormous deficit if you calculated the exports to the Continent (and even the occasional ones to New England). Nothing, or almost nothing, remained for HOME CONSUMPTION. T h e business was easily solved. It has now been proved (a fact perhaps known to you, but new to me) that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the English h a d verbotenus[10] approximately 3 years' stock (naturally for a DIMINISHED SCALE OF PRODUCTION). What a fine crash that would have produced if the Civil War had not broken out!

T h e EXPORTS OF YARN and MANUFACTURED GOODS in 1862, 1863 and 1864 w e r e = 1,208,920,000 lbs (REDUCED TO YARN) and the SUPPLIES (IMPORTS) (REDUCED TO EQUIVALENT WEIGHT IN YARN)= 1,187,369,000 lbs. In the first figure, the surplus of baryta hidden in the MANUFACTURED GOODS has probably been overlooked. Even so, the result roughly emerges that the entire HOME SUPPLY was met from existing stocks.[11]

Salut.

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ Marx means the letter of A. A. Serno-Solovyevich
  2. ↑ A reference to Sigfrid Meyer's letter of 24 November 1868, which was a reply to Marx's letter of 28 October 1868 (see this volume, pp. 148-49). Meyer wrote about the progress of the labour movement in the USA and the work he was doing with August Vogt to set up a German Section of the International in New York.
  3. ↑ See this volume, p. 97.
  4. ↑ S. Borkheim
  5. ↑ beginning of the quarter
  6. ↑ furnished room
  7. ↑ E. Ténot, Paris en décembre 1851..., Paris, 1868. E. Ténot, La Province en décembre 1851... Paris, 1868. See also this volume, p. 188.
  8. ↑ Heinemann
  9. ↑ A reference to the cotton crisis produced by the cessation of cotton deliveries from the USA due to the blockade of the slave-owning Southern states by the Northern states' navy during the Civil War of 1861-65. The cotton famine in Britain began just before the overproduction crisis and merged with it. Since 1862, and for two or three years, three-quarters of the cotton mills in Lancashire, Cheshire, and some other counties stood totally or partially idle.
  10. ↑ literally
  11. ↑ Marx quotes the figures from the article 'A Phase of the Cotton Trade during the Civil War', published in The Economist, No. 1181, 14 April 1866, p. 447 (signed J. E.).