| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 1 December 1892 |
ENGELS TO NATALIE AND WILHELM LIEBKNECHT
IN BERLIN
London, 1 December 1892
Dear Mrs Liebknecht,
My best thanks for your kind note and good wishes for my seventy-second birthday which we celebrated last Sunday amidst the usual circle of friends[1] all of whom remained until the 28th had actually dawned! Winter seems to have set in really early over there if you have already been blessed with snow and a temperature of 10 degrees R. We don't have such extremes, but rather content ourselves with a pleasing alternation of rain and fog, getting more of both than we should like.
Unfortunately it was not possible to send off this letter in time to give your Willy[2] my greetings on his birthday. I trust you will be so good as to accept these belated wishes. I thought it probable that your Theodor[3] to whom, as also to Karl,[4] please convey my sincere thanks for the good wishes, would be able to take a break from his tedious week in Mittenwald by spending a Sunday with you, and I'm glad to see that this was in fact so. The best of luck to your Karl with his exams. 73 I, who never passed an exam in my life, can nevertheless well imagine how a young man must feel three months before such an event.
The Stadthagen affair has shown that they are still perfectly capable of persecuting us even without the Anti-Socialist Law. 15 That the debate on salary at the Party Congress 52 has caused your family great annoyance I can well believe, but that kind of thing is inevitable in public life. Not everyone is as eager as the German Reichstag to vote grants; in other countries even ministers and, on occasion, crowned heads no less, must expose themselves to unpleasantnesses of this kind. It is a case of everyone trying to prove that 'where money begins, benevolence ends'. 74 On the other hand, Liebknecht enjoyed a well-earned triumph with the Ems Despatch, 75 which makes up for a good deal, and then again his trip to Marseilles was an ovation from start to finish.
Pumps felt impelled to show the world that, despite her prematurely grey hair, she is still a young woman and therefore presented her husband with a baby girl a little more than a fortnight ago. Both are doing very well under the circumstances. I too am keeping pretty well on the whole but am still not yet mobile enough. However when one looks out of the window at the persistent downpour, one is less inclined to make a fuss about it.
Take good care of yourself; with best wishes to you and all your family.
Yours,
F. Engels
Dear Liebknecht,
You will have to wait a little while for the sequel to this, as Volume II[5] admits of no delay. In France it almost seems as though we are back in '47, and Panama 60 could well put paid to all the bourgeois cochonnerie.[6] The scandals of 1847 and of the Second Empire are trivial by comparison. Do write and tell your Paris correspondents to keep you informed about it and to send you the material in newspapers—these are matters you must pursue in person.
Your old F. E.