| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 19 February 1892 |
ENGELS TO VICTOR ADLER
IN VIENNA
London, 19 February 1892
Dear Victor,
I was on the point of replying the other day to the letter you wrote me from Salo, when I was badly balked. Owing to the publisher's[1] malice, stupidity, or both, Aveling's translation of my Entwicklung des Sozialismus,[2] which I was supposed to revise while still in manuscript form, had already been set up and came to me in complete, made-up, paginated proof. In view of the law in this country which delivers up the author to the publisher bound hand and foot, I ran the risk of the thing coming before the public as it stood and thus of incurring dis- credit, for the ms. was only a rough draft. So everything else had to be left undone until the thing had been revised and the publisher per- suaded by devious means to reconcile himself to the expenses for which he himself was to blame. Well, the worst is now over, and the first person to be sent a reply will be you.
We were overjoyed to learn that your wife[3] is better and that her recovery may be confidently anticipated. You have enough work, tri- als and tribulations as it is, and the Austrian movement is in far too great need of every ounce of your strength for us not to have given a sigh of relief on hearing that the worst of your worries was over, in this respect at any rate. But you will, I hope, permit us to rejoice, not only as party members but also as your personal friends, at the pros- pect that, having made a complete recovery, your wife will shortly be restored to you and that so fine a woman as your Emma is not to suf- fer the terrible fate which for a moment seemed to hang over her.
But if in the circumstances you succumbed to a mood which you yourself describe as dejected, it is only too understandable. Mean- while circumstances have, it seems, helped you Austrians out of the deadlock which you had feared, and with good reason. The proposed haphazard reconstruction of Greater Vienna provided you with an opportunity upon which you, with your habitual flair, instantly seized and duly exploited in accordance with the model originally placed before the Paris Municipal Council by Vaillant and our chaps.[4] (The Possibilists[5] did no more than hasten its passage through the Municipal Council by selling themselves to the bour- geois Radicals[6] in return for services rendered in other spheres thus, in their low cunning, doing us a service and, what's more, pav- ing the way for their own destruction.) So in what direction I am supposed to give you the 'fillip' requested, if not actually demanded, of me in a letter to Louise, I fail to see. The French have a peculiar knack of giving the right political form to demands of this kind, and that is what happened in this case. In this country, too, some of the French demands have been adopted by the London COUNTY COUNCIL, while others figure in the electoral manifestos of every Labour candidate.[7] Since the elections to the COUNTY COUNCIL are to take place on 5 March, these manifestos are playing an important role just now, and The Work- man's Times, which I hope you get regularly, will thus provide you with propaganda material of all kinds. And the business ought to be exploited to the utmost, first in the interests of agitation generally and of potential individual victories, and secondly and more particularly in order to eliminate the otherwise inevitable hostility between the workers of Vienna and the starveling coolie and sweated labour im- ported from abroad. This is a point you brought out particularly well.
You will eventually get your daily paper, but it must in the main be your own creation. Considering the nature of your press laws, the step from weekly to daily would seem to me a very big one for which long, robust legs are required, and one which would also make you more vulnerable than ever to a government intent on ruining you by means of fines and legal costs. This is fresh proof of your government's cunning—always greater in small matters. The Prussians are too stupid for that sort of thing, relying as they do on brute force, while your pol- iticians are stupid only when it comes to doing anything big. Person- ally, I rather doubt whether, in view of the fines you would incur, you would be able to keep a daily going for as much as six months and, were it to collapse, the defeat would be hard to get over.
But in order to do my bit for the Austrians, and since all my fees from stuff issued by the Vorwärts Publishers find their way willy-nilly into German party funds, I have decided that all fees from the stuff published by Dietz should go to you people and have instructed him ac- cordingly.[8]
I feel sorry for Rudolf Meyer; to judge by your account and the news since received about his staying in Moravia instead of Palermo, he must be in a very poor way with his diabetes. For all his astonish- ing and often comical megalomania, he is the only Conservative to have risked anything for his social demagogic schemes and socialist sympathies and to have gone into exile because of them. And while in exile he has discovered that, though the Austrian and French aristo- crats might be far more gentlemanly in social intercourse than the rot- ten Prussian Junkers, they are no less tenacious in the pursuit of their rents, ambitions, etc. Things have come to such a pass that he, the only remaining genuine Conservative, is now vainly searching for men with whom he might found a genuine Conservative party.
For the rest, affairs are taking a critical turn. In the German Reichstag a considerable crisis is brewing. Little Willie,[9] it seems, wishes for once to put his regis voluntas[10] to the test and is actually driving the deplorable members of the National Liberal Party[11] into the arms of the opposition; already there are signs of conflict. In addition, there is a ministerial crisis in France which is of great importance to us because Constans is rabidly anti-working class and his fall will bring about a number of changes in domestic affairs; also because the recurrence of instability in French government circles is very unwel- come to the Russian alliance which is in any case on its last legs.
The enclosed appeared in the Critica Sociale[12]
Louise sends you the enclosed. She has spent the whole day disen- gaging oxygen — on paper; she is studying chemistry under circum- stances aggravated by the English textbooks and the absence of experiments...[13]