ENGELS TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT
IN BERLIN
London, 8 December 1890
Dear Liebknecht,
There is more trouble in store for Brentano than he expects—just you wait and see! Thanks for the note about Gladstone, but I should point out that / require the issues of the 'Deutsches Wochenblatt containing the text of what Brentano and Gladstone actually said—the short note would only mislead me, and I mustn't allow that to happen. If you haven't got time to obtain them for me, ask Fischer who will certainly do so at once.
Leave Brentano to me. You won't be disappointed. But without this new material I can't finish the thing off[1]
Your
F.E.
Since Gladstone's letters were dated 22 and 28 November, there can be no doubt about which issues of the Wochenblatt[2] the stuff is in.
- ↑ In his preface to the fourth German edition of Volume I of Capital in June 1890 (see present edition, Vol. 35) Engels described in detail Marx's 1872 polemic with the German economist Lujo Brentano, who had accused Marx of misquoting a passage from Gladstone's parliamentary speech of 16 April 1863 in reproducing it in the Inaugural Address of the Working Men's International Association and in Vol ume I of Capital. Brentano's reaction to Engels' presentation of the case was the pamphlet Meine Polemik mit Karl Marx, Berlin, 1890, the introduction to which was published in Deutsches Wochenblatt, No. 45, 6 November 1890. On 4 Decem ber this journal carried a note containing two passages from Gladstone's letters to Brentano of 22 and 28 November 1890 in which Gladstone asserted that Brentano was right.
Engels replied in a brief article, 'In the Case of Brentano Versus Marx' (Die Neue Zeit, 9. Jg., 1890/91, 1. Bd., Nr. 13) and, at greater length, in a pamphlet of the same title, published in April 1891, which contained a large number of docu ments, including the above-mentioned article (see present edition, Vol. 27).
- ↑ 'Mittheilung', signed: O.A., Deutsches Wochenblatt, No. 49, 4 December 1890.