Letter to Karl Marx, September 21, 1874

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 21 September 1874


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart 1913
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


ENGELS TO MARX

IN HAMBURG

London, 21 September 1874

Dear Moor,

I would have written to you long before, had it not been for the fact that the news from Karlsbad left me in doubt whether a letter would still reach you.

Delighted to hear that Karlsbad has borne fruit. Once your liver is back in working order, it will be possible in due course to calm down your nervous system again after the further stimulation provoked by the cure. You will also have to continue the treatment on your return and should bring instructions with you from [1] Karlsbad about how to proceed. It was absurd of you not to have gone via Dresden; the journey is much prettier and some idle touring would have done you good just now. But there is still time to visit the Holstein coast from Hamburg and you should in any case spend a few days there, it is very attractive. If you are SHORT OF CASH Meissner can give you an advance and we shall pay him back from here.

You will have seen reports of the Brussels congress[2] in The Times; they were obviously written by Wingfield, or whatever his name is, who was in The Hague. IT WAS A MISERABLE FAILURE: 14 people, all Belgians apart from 2 German Lassalleans (Frohme from Frankfurt and?[3] ), Schwitzguébel, 1 Spaniard, Gomez, and Eccarius.—Rochat has sent us a highly entertaining account of the nonsense in a small Brussels paper, La Gazette[4]

Furthermore, the two Scheus[5] and the restless Frankel were within an ace of destroying the German communist society here.[6]

Determined to prove that they could act, they arranged a public meeting in their pub and invited the Lassallean robber band of Zilinski et Co., whom they had such difficulty in ejecting only 2 years previously! I learned of it only when it was too late, gave Frankel a piece of my mind and also gave him instructions about what to do, whereupon, naturally, he did the opposite. WELL, as was to be expected, Zilinski turned up with 50-60 men (while from the society there were barely 10 men!), packed the committee with his own supporters and they HAD IT ALL THEIR OWN WAY. Finally, the meeting was adjourned, and so we were spared the worst, but it is not over yet. Since I have not yet seen Lessner (who must have something on his conscience, otherwise he would have come), I have not yet had a reliable report on what transpired. Frankel is very peeved about his act of heroism and your wife has given him a good scolding. The Scheus appear to be IRREPRESSIBLE MEDDLERS.

In Leipzig you will perhaps have a chance to see Bios who is being released tomorrow or the day after. At any rate, you will have heard that the Cologne workers want to publish a daily paper and Bios has approached me to find out whether they could call it Neue Rheinische Zeitung—Bios is to be the editor. Since it was not possible to confer with you—at the start of your stay in Karlsbad and before any news had arrived from you—I had to make a provisional decision. CONSIDERING that this is the first time that these people have approached us IN A BECOMING MANNER, 2. that it is unlikely that we shall ever publish a Neue Rheinische Zeitung again ourselves, if only because of the provincial nature of Cologne, J had no objection quant à moi,[7] and I also hazarded the opinion that you too would agree to it. Jenny,[8] whom I consulted as your representative, was also of this opinion. It would have made a very shabby impression on the Rhineland workers if we had refused. However, if you have any objections there is still time to reverse the matter.[9]

The Volksstaat under Wilhelm[10] is becoming worse and even more boring thanks to the tendency to accept materials uncritically just to fill up space. Only here and there is there anything readable.

I am deeply immersed in the doctrine of essence. Back from Jersey, I found Tyndall's and Huxley's speeches in Belfast[11]

waiting for me, which once again reveal the plight of these people, and the way they are stuck fast in the thing-in-itself and their cry of anguish for a philosophy to rescue them. This brought me back again, after all manner of interruptions on the first week, to the theme of dialectics. In view of the feeble mind of the natural scientists, the great Logic[12] can only be used sparingly, although as far as dialectics are concerned, it goes much more nearly to the heart of the matter. But the account of it in the Encyclopaedia,[13] on the other hand, could have been tailor-made for these people, the illustrations are taken largely from their own subject and are striking, and at the same time, because of the more popular presentation, they are freer of idealism. Now, since I neither can nor will exempt these gentlemen from the punishment of having to learn from Hegel, it is clear that there is a veritable treasure-trove here, all the more so since even today the old fellow can give them a number of tough nuts to crack. Tyndall's inaugural lecture, incidentally, is the boldest speech to have been delivered in England to such an audience, and has created a tremendous impression and panic. It is evident that Haeckel's much more incisive manner of speaking has not let him rest. I have the verbatim report in Nature, which you can read here. His acknowledgement to Epicurus will amuse you. So much is certain: the return to a genuinely reflective view of nature is making much more serious progress here in England than in Germany, and people here seek salvation at least in Epicurus, Descartes, Hume and Kant, rather than in Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The French thinkers of the eighteenth century, of course, are still taboo.

In New York, the rowdies and braggarts have obtained a majority in the General Council, and Sorge has abdicated and completely retired. All the better. It means that we have absolutely no responsibility for the nonsense any more and it will soon die a natural death. How fortunate that we have records of the proceedings!

Quant à la grande politique,[14] we can fortunately LET IT TAKE CARE OF ITSELF; there will be time enough to laugh about it all when you return.

Otherwise everything here is ALL RIGHT, Jenny looked very well the day before yesterday and was in high spirits. Wroblewski is better and has used the electricity. There was never any question of amputating his arm, only of cutting out a piece of muscle in which, in all probability, a nerve end had become lodged, thus causing the pain. But he must have felt terrible and our money came in the nick of time.

Regards to Meissner from me; I shall be writing to him myself about various matters.

Warmest regards to Tussy, à revoir.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ Gertrud Kugelmann
  2. ↑ On 7-13 September 1874, a number of organisations that had found themselves outside the International due to their refusal to recognise the Hague Congress resolutions (see Note 20) held a congress in Brussels that declared itself the seventh congress of the International Working Men's Association. It was attended by members of anarchist groups from Switzerland, Spain and Belgium, two Lassalleans—members of German workers' organisations in Belgium—and Eccarius, who had been delegated by the breakaway faction of the British Federation. The congress revealed disagreement among the participants, including the anarchists themselves, on the issue of the working class' attitude to the state.
  3. ↑ Paul Kersten
  4. ↑ La Gazette de Bruxelles
  5. ↑ Heinrich and Andreas
  6. ↑ The reference is to the German Workers' Educational Society in London founded in February 1840 by Karl Schapper, Joseph Moll and other members of the League of the Just. After the establishment of the Communist League in 1847, the leading role in the Society was assumed by the League's local communities. Marx and Engels were actively involved in its work in 1847 and 1849-50. On 17 September 1850, Marx, Engels and some of their followers left the Society in protest at the domination of the Willich-Schapper group, and rejoined it only in the late 1850s. After the foundation of the International Working Men's Association, the Society with Lessner among its leaders, became its German section in London. The London Educational Society existed until 1918, when it was closed down by the British government.
  7. ↑ for my part
  8. ↑ Jenny Longuet
  9. ↑ The plan to start a workers' newspaper called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne failed to materialise at that time.
  10. ↑ Wilhelm Liebknecht
  11. ↑ Engels is referring to John Tyndall's inaugural address to the 44th congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which opened in Belfast on 19 August 1874 (the address was published in Nature, No. 251, 20 August 1874), and to Henry Huxley's speech 'On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automats, and Its History' made at the Association's meeting of 24 August (Nature, No. 253, 3 September 1874). Engels used Tyndall's speech in his Dialectics of Nature (see present edition, Vol. 25, p. 481).
  12. ↑ G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik.
  13. ↑ G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Part 1: Die Logik.
  14. ↑ As for high politics