Letter to Friedrich Engels, September 17, 1878

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 17 September 1878


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


MARX TO ENGELS

IN LITTLEHAMPTON

[London,] 17 September 1878

DEAR FRED, I am writing this letter before going to your house (it is still very early); should I find a letter for you there, I shall send it under separate cover.

The news from Malvern is much better so that it won't be necessary for me to go there; but for safety's sake the doctor is now calling regularly every day; I had already suggested as much to my wife so as to prevent their constantly flying into needless

[1] [2]

PANICS on the one hand and neglecting necessary precautions on the other; but she and above all Jennychen foolishly objected, not wishing, as they said, to add 'needlessly' to the already enormous doctors' BILLS in Malvern. Now they realise that I was right. I had similarly prescribed a regular drive at the best time of day, whenever the child's[3] condition permitted. This, too, has now been endorsed by the doctor. These drives are Jennychen's only recreation and, for my wife—whose cure has been seriously impaired by the continual TROUBLES with the child—the only means of combatting these influences which are so detrimental to her health. So long as I remained there,[4] I saw to it that this was done.

Mr Eulenburg (vide PAPERS OF TODAY)[5] ' will not, for his part, be carrying any coals to Newcastle.[6] Anything more pitiful than the EXTRACT—quintessence—of his SPEECH I have yet to see. Stolberg, too, is good. The purpose of the exceptional law[7] is to deprive the Social-Democratic movement of every vestige of legality. Probatum est^ Mettre hors la loi[8] has, from time immemorial, been an infallible means of making anti-government movements 'illegal', and protecting the government from the law—la légalité nous tue.[9] Reichensperger represents the Rhenish bourgeois of the Centre.[10] Bamberger adheres faithfully to 'We are but dogs!'.[11]

Bebel has clearly made an impression.[12] (See Daily News OF TO-DAY.)

It's a good beginning. According to various English newspapers our friend Kovalevsky has been shot in Odessa; they spell his name thus—Kowalsky. The FAT BOY, who came to see me on Sunday,6 told me a very choice anecdote. Before his departure, sundry 'diplomatic' aspirants amongst his Moscow students had to sit an examination. They included a number of laddies much older than himself, notably Montenegrins, who were being given an academic training at the expense of the RUSSIAN ASIATIC (DIPLOMATIC) DEPARTMENT. These laddies are distinguished by their DENSENESS and advanced age, as once the country bumpkins at our grammar school in Trier, who were preparing to enter the seminary (Catholic) and most of them drawing stipends.

Although marks (for university examinations) in Russia run from 0 to 5, Kovalevsky awarded only two lots of marks—4 for

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those who knew nothing at all and 5 for those who knew something. During the last examinations he was approached by one of his students, a long, lanky Montenegrin of 32, who said: 'You must award me a 5; I know that I don't know anything, but on the other hand I know that, if I get "another" 4, the ASIATIC DEPARTMENT will send me packing back to Montenegro; so that's why you must award me a 5.' Needless to say, he failed his examination with flying colours, since Kovalevsky—as, indeed, he had told him—could see NO NECESSITY for his continued residence in Moscow.

The oddest part of it is—or so Kovalevsky says—that all these laddies from Montenegro become imbued while in Moscow with a fanatical hatred of the Russians. They naively told him as much themselves, the alleged reason being that 'the Russians IN GENERAL, and Russian students in particular, tell us we're barbarians and blockheads and treat us as such'. Hence the Russian government achieves precisely the opposite of what it intended with its 'benefactions'.

What used to be a private joke of ours, namely that it's the Russian socialists who commit the 'atrocities' for which the 'law-abiding' German Social-Democrats are to be put hors la loi, has been adduced in all seriousness by the fatuous Stolberg.[15]

Only he forgot to add that, alongside those 'atrocities', there exists in Russia a 'state of law' which is the ideal if unattainable goal aimed at by that squireen Bismarck's bill.

The fact that the Russians, with the support of Prussia and Austria, are yet again seeking 'European mediation' is a highly significant symptom.

Adio. I trust that you are recovering in Littlehampton from your recent shock. Love from Tussy and Lenchen.

Your

Moor

  1. ↑ b reigning princess
  2. ↑ c Probably Henry Longuet.
  3. ↑ Jean Longuet's
  4. ↑ Engels is referring to the birth of the eighth child in Philipp Pauli's family, of which the latter informed him on 17 July 1878.
  5. ↑ Marx is referring to the inaugural congress of the Austrian Social-Democratic Workers' Party illegally held in Neudörf on 5 and 6 April 1874. Present at it were 74 delegates, 10 of them representing Czech workers' organisations that favoured a single Austrian Social-Democratic Party incorporating workers' organisations in the Slav territories. The congress founded the party and elected its leading bodies. The Délnické listy (Workers' Paper) published in Prague in Czech was to become the party's central printed organ alongside the Gleichheit.
  6. ↑ A punning reference to the name Eulenburg, 'Eulen'=owls, and 'to take owls to Athens', the equivalent of carrying coals to Newcastle.
  7. ↑ A reference to the Anti-Socialist Law. The discussion of the bill began in the Reichstag on 16 September 1878 (see Note 462).
  8. ↑ To put outside the law
  9. ↑ La légalité nous tue (legality is killing us): Marx repeats what Jean Pons Viennet, a right-wing representative in the French Chamber of Deputies, said in his speech on 23 March 1833. This was also quoted by the conservative politician Odillon Barrot in his speech to the Constituent Assembly of the French Republic early in 1849.
  10. ↑ The Party of the Centre, a political party of German Catholics, was formed in 1870-71 following the merger of the Catholic groups in the Prussian Landtag and the German Reichstag (the deputies of these parties sat in the centre of the assembly hall). The Party of the Centre normally took a non-committal approach, manoeuvring between the pro-government parties and the left opposition in the Reichstag. It united different social sections among the Catholic clergy, landowners, bourgeois and part of the peasantry (mostly in small and medium states in Western and South-Western Germany), and supported their separatist and anti-Prussian leanings. Although in opposition to the Bismarck government, the Party of the Centre nevertheless voted for its repressive measures against the working-class and socialist movement. Engels described it in detail in his essays 'The Role of Force in History' (see present edition, Vol. 26) and 'What Now?' (Vol. 27).
  11. ↑ 'We are but dogs!' ('Hunde sind wir ja doch!'). This is how, according to August Bebel, the German democratic political writer Luis Bamberger described the treatment which the National Liberals received from Bismarck.
  12. ↑ In his speech to the Reichstag on 16 September 1878, August Bebel refuted the groundless accusations against the Social-Democrats which had given Bismarck a pretext to introduce the Anti-Socialist Bill. He noted that time would show its pointlessness, since the Social-Democrats would be able to disseminate their ideas even working underground.
  13. ↑ c It has been proved.
  14. ↑ e 15 September
  15. ↑ Opening the Reichstag session on 16 September 1878, Count Stolberg-Wernigerode stated the allied governments' conviction that ideas repudiating all norms of law and morality and seriously threatening the state and society had become prevalent among the general public. This, he said, was sufficient grounds for introducing an anti-socialist law.