ENGELS TO KARL KAUTSKY
IN D E A L
London, 6 August 1886
Dear Kautsky,
We leave tomorrow for Eastbourne. Address 4 Cavendish Place, as before.
Have just booked a passage for Liebknecht on the Cunard STEAMER Servia and sent him the receipt.[1]
You will find your MONEY ORDER here in an addressed envelope. Also sundry American Sozialists for yourself and sundry American Volks-Zeitungs along with the Missouri Republican containing the outrageous interview — please keep these Volkszeitungs and the Republican for me.
Will you please — when you get back — continue to forward my letters, etc., at regular intervals, i.e. at most every other day, but as a rule twice a week, just as you did before?
The translation of the ms.[2] was finally completed yesterday; 23 sheets have been set up and the proofs are in hand.
Liebknecht is sailing from Liverpool on 4 September, the Avelings on 31 August.[3] We shall be staying here until 28 August for certain and if possible a week longer; it depends on Liebknecht's arrival and other possible visitors.
You will have read about the sentences in Freiberg[4] — 6 months for Dietz, Heinzel and Müller, 9 for the others.[5] Typically German.
Thank you for your news from Vienna. Otherwise all is tranquil while the world takes a breather, the one exception being the Russians who are surreptitiously intriguing away for all they are worth. Giers evidently intends to wangle something worthwhile out of Bismarck this year, but I don't imagine he will succeed.
Kindest regards to your wife.
Your
F.E.
- ↑ At the invitation of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Labor Party (see Note 549) Wilhelm Liebknecht took part in a campaign tour of the United States to raise money for the German Social Democrats' election fund. Eleanor Marx-Aveling and Edward Aveling made a trip around the United States at approximately the same time (see Note 601). Liebknecht stayed in Eastbourne with Engels for four days, left Liverpool on 4 September and arrived in New York on 13 September where he met the Avelings. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington and other cities he gave talks and lectures on the theory and history of socialism, the state of the workers' movement in Europe and other subjects. This trip, which he completed on 26 November, raised 16,000 marks for the German Social Democrats' election fund. On his way back to Germany, Liebknecht stayed with Engels in London from 5 to 10 December, following which he set off on his way home to Borsdorf near Leipzig.
- ↑ the English translation of the first volume of Capital (see Note 56)
- ↑ The reference is to Marx's and Engels' joint work on the manuscript of The German Ideology and to Engels' work The True Socialists (see present edition, Vol. 5) between 1845 and 1847. Not long before his death Engels dictated to Eduard Bernstein a list of manuscripts from his own and Marx's literary legacy and of other materials stored in his archives. The list contained the following note, '... manuscript of The German Ideology' ('Stirner, 1845/46, Moor and I', 'Feuerbach and Bauer, 1846/47, Moor and I', 'True Socialism, 1847, Moor and I').
- ↑ Freiburg in the original.
- ↑ As a re-examination of a sentence passed by a court in Chemnitz (see Note 446), a new trial began on 25 July 1886 in Freiberg (Saxony) of a group of leading figures in the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. On 4 August 1886 the local provincial court sentenced Ignaz Auer, August Bebel, Carl Ulrich, Louis Viereck, Georg Heinrich von Vollmar and Karl Franz Egon Frohme to nine months', as well as Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz, Philipp Heinrich Müller and Stefan Heinzel, to six months' imprisonment on a charge of belonging to a 'secret society'. Bebel served his prison sentence in Zwickau from mid-November 1886 to 14 August 1887.