Letter to Thomas Allsop, February 4, 1878

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 4 February 1878


First published, in the language of the original (English), in the catalogue Sotheby Parke Bernet and C°, London, 1966
Published in English in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO THOMAS ALLSOP

IN LONDON

[Extract]

[London,] 4 February 1878

You are mistaken, if you believe that Disraeli is in my opinion a great man. He was always a self-seeker, and such people, whatever their natural gifts, are always deficient. But, dans le royaume des aveugles les borgnes, etc.[1] !

You are still more mistaken, if you consider Lord Commonplace[2]

as a small man or an adversary easily to be borne down! He is, on the contrary, the mightiest man in the British Empire. On the one hand, the oldest nobility man, on the other the intellectual incarnation of the great middle-class. Business is business—this is the only serious part of your bourgeois: everything else is

show—and must, consequently, be got rid of by mild talk, conventional utterances, inane twaddle. What a power, therefore, the Lord of Commonplace! If an Earl of Derby did not exist, the decaying nobility and the upstart brokers ought to have invented him...[3]

Turkey and Austria were the last props of the old State System of Europe... It will go now altogether to the wall, expiring in a succession of wars, which will precipitate the Social Crisis and engulf all the so-called Powers, those sham-powers, victors and vanquished—to make room for a European Social Revolution.

One way or another our enemies are digging their own graves!

  1. ↑ Dans le royaume des aveugles les borgnes sont rois—In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed is King.
  2. ↑ The Earl of Derby (see also this volume, p. 296).
  3. ↑ Marx is playing on the well-known saying ascribed to Voltaire: 'If God did not exist, He ought to have been invented.'