| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 4 February 1886 |
ENGELS TO FERDINAND DOMELA NIEUWENHUIS
IN THE HAGUE
London, 4 February 1886
Dear Comrade,
I am reading your work Hoe ons land geregeerd wordt with great pleasure, firstly because I am relearning a great deal of conversational Dutch therefrom and secondly because I am learning so much about the internal administration of Holland. Along with England and Switzerland, Holland is the only West European country not to have had absolute monarchy in the period between the 16th and 18th centuries, and in consequence enjoys a number of advantages, notably a residue of local and provincial self-government and an absence of any real bureaucracy in the French or Prussian sense. This is a great advantage both as regards the development of a national character and as regards the future; for only a few changes will have to be made to establish here that free self-government by the working [people][1] which will necessarily be our best tool in the reorganisation of the mode of production. All this is lacking in Germany and France and will have to be built up from scratch. May I congratulate you on your success in producing a popular exposition.
Your translation of my pamphlet[2] places me most deeply in your debt. In this instance it will not be so easy to employ popular language throughout, as in your little opus, but this should present no problem to someone with so good a command of both languages as yourself.
Gewanne' are the strips of land of roughly the same quality into which common agricultural and pasture land is first divided; maybe ten or twenty in all. Then each commoner with full rights is given an equal share of each strip. Thus, if there are ten strips and a hundred commoners, there will be 1,000 parcels of land all told, each commoner getting 10 parcels, one in each strip. Subsequently commoners may often swap parcels so that though they may have fewer individual plots, their holdings are more compact. The same thing was still happening until quite lately in Ireland in the 'RUNDALE' villages, and in the Highlands of Scotland (cf. Fortnightly Review, November 1885, an article on VILLAGE COMMUNITIES in Scotland[3] ).
G. L. Maurer has written:
1) Einleitung in die Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf- und Städteverfassung in Deutschland.
2) Geschichte der Markenverfassung in Deutschland.
3) Geschichte der Hofverfassung — 4 vols.
4) ditto Städteverfassung — 2 "
5) ditto Dorf Verfassung — 2 "
Nos. 1 and 2 are the most important, but the others are not without importance either, particularly as regards German history. Repetitiveness, poor style and lack of method make these otherwise excellent books difficult to study. On n'est pas Allemand pour rien![4]
The best works on the great French Revolution are indubitably those of Georges Avenel who died round about 1875. Lundis révolutionnaires, a collection of feuilletons which came out in the République Française; also, Anacharsis Cloots, this last a survey, forming part of the biography, of the course of the Revolution up till Thermidor 1794. It's melodramatically written and, if one is not to lose the thread, one has continually to refer to Mignet[5] or Thiers[6] for the exact dates. But Avenel has made a close study of the archives and also produces a vast amount of new and reliable material. He is indisputably the best source for the period from September 1792 to July 1794. Then there is a very good book by Bougeart on Jean Paul Marat, L'Ami du peuple; also another about Marat, said to be good, the name of whose author eludes me — it begins with Ch.[7] Some other good stuff also appeared in the final years of the Empire; the Robespierrites (Hamel, St.-Just etc.) not, on the whole, so good — mostly mere rhetoric and quotations from speeches.
Mignet still remains the bourgeois historian of my choice. The Kautskys, Avelings, and Lenchen send their kindest regards. What is the position about your coming over here in the summer?
With kindest regards from
Yours,
F. Engels