| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 22 November 1894 |
ENGELS TO KARL KAUTSKY
IN STUTTGART
London, 22 November 1894
41 Regent's Park Road, N. W.
Dear Baron, The agrarian article[1] goes off to you today by registered book post. Since the handwriting is rotten, may I have the proofs? They will be promptly attended to.
Am just reading Ledebour's reply to you. 424 The chap's trying to be too clever by half. As though, two years ago, you could have foreseen what Vollmar would be like today. And it really is a bit much to conclude, merely because the small peasant has been told there is no intention of forcibly evicting him, that the intention is to provide economic conditions such as will enable him to continue farming on his own account. Obviously, as things are today, you would have worded this or that passage differently. But nobody is proof against verbal hair-splitting and my article might suffer exactly the same fate.
I look forward to seeing how the polemic initiated by Bebel is going to develop. 425 It was long overdue.
I simply have not got the time just now to go into the matter of the International's attitude to the question of land ownership. Besides, it has been a ticklish point so far as the International is concerned. Firstly because of the Proudhonists in France, Belgium, etc., and their enthusiasm for parcels of land, and secondly because of Bakunin's hobby-horse, the abolition of inheritance, which tended to obscure the issue. 426
Needless to say, the Vorwärts has come down in favour of unity, i.e. of hushing things up. Nothing can be done about this for the present. But anyone who hushes things up can now only be of assistance to Vollmar and will have to bear the consequences. The only correct thing for me to do is, I think, to intervene in an absolutely objective way and leave personalities completely out of it. Otherwise it will again be said that I am
trying to influence the party from without, etc.
Apropos, could you, when convenient, insert the enclosed review 427 in such a way that people don't realise it emanates from me? I don't want to put a correction in the Vorwärts, or Liebknecht would again append some rigmarole or other, and yet I cannot allow the thing to pass.
Congratulations on son no. II I—as you will have heard, we have also had a lying-in here; Louise having born a strong girl, everything went off all right and the baby girl ought to be called 'tippling Amalie'!
Yours,
F.E.