Letter to Victor Adler, January 28, 1895

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 28 January 1895


First published abridged in Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 327, 28 November 1920 and in full in Victor Adlers Aufsätze, Reden und Briefe. Erstes Heft: Victor Adler und Friedrich Engels, Vienna, 1922
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 50


ENGELS TO VICTOR ADLER

IN VIENNA

London, 28 January 1895

Dear Victor,

Many congratulations from myself and everyone else here on the rapid success achieved by the Arbeiter-Zeitung[1] It was no more than I expected, but to see it confirmed in actual fact is, of course, also worth a great deal.

There is no need at all for you to worry about the editorial side. During the early weeks you, as organiser, are infinitely more important than you would be as actual editor. Once everything is going smoothly, you should have no difficulty in striking the right note in the paper. You are quite right about it's being a mite too serious. A bit more humour, particularly on the front page, which used always to be very funny in the twice-weekly edition, would do no harm at all. However, that will come.

A direct telegraph service from foreign capitals would be of absolutely no use to you. That would mean your having a properly organised office in every city with a chief correspondent to run it professionally, and solely on your account; here in London this would cost between six hundred and a thousand pounds a year, and even so you wouldn't be getting the best news from ministerial or opposition circles, for the simple reason that you are only accorded priority and given news of this sort ahead of everyone else and before it has become common property if you are able to reciprocate by giving your informants your support and publishing the ready-made puffs they send you. But that is just what our press cannot do. So, where news from official circles is concerned, you will never be able to compete with the big bourgeois papers who not only monopolise the sources but can also organise news-gathering services on a footing similar to that of big industry.

It's hard luck, your having to content yourselves during the first few weeks with the little provincial assemblies, but the Diet will soon be meeting again and then you will have plenty of material, whereupon your personal intervention will again become necessary.

The differences in the Ministry here are of no great account so far as their practical consequences are concerned. The Liberal government contains as many shades of opinion as it has members. Now that the big bourgeoisie together with Whig aristocrats[2] and the university ideologues have gone over to the Conservative camp (a process which began after 1848, gained impetus after the Reform Bill of 1867[3] and became very marked after the HOME RULE BILL[4] ), Liberalism has been largely an omnium gatherum of all the sects and sectarian crotchets in this sect-ridden country. And since each individual sect considers its own particular crotchet to be the one and only panacea, the result is constant strife.

But of greater moment than that strife is the certain knowledge that only cohesion vis-à-vis the outside world can keep them in power for a few months longer. Consequently it is a matter of pure chance which tendency may gain the upper hand.

I have been sending you in rotation copies of the three labour newspapers which still survive here. Since you get the Clarion by way of exchange I shall spare you this in future. There is nothing much in any of the three but nevertheless it's advisable that you should take a look at one or the other from time to time. The Labour Leader is an institution for the idolisation of Keir Hardie; he is a cunning, crafty Scot, a Pecksniff and arch-intriguer, but too cunning, perhaps, and too vain. The financial sources he draws upon to keep the paper going are of a dubious kind, which might cause unpleasantness when the new elections are held.

Apropos. Not a single copy of Thursday evening's issue[5] (confiscated) arrived here. But nevertheless I should like to read the article, K. M. in Wien[6] Could you get hold of another copy for me? That was an astounding piece of cheek, by the way your announcing the confiscation to have been so extraordinarily effective that it enabled you to save yourselves the expense of another, quite unnecessary, edition.[7] You people are lucky in Austria—if you were to say something like that in Prussia they would promptly chuck three Subversion Bills[8] at your head.

We shall be sending you extracts from Crawford's Paris letters whenever they contain something of interest. I would specially call your attention to them. She has been in Paris for over forty years, knows every mouse in the place by name, possesses dossiers on the career of every politician and is a good judge of character. No one in Paris can equal her knowledge of personalities and you would therefore be well-advised to file away for future reference even those articles for which you have no present use. Over and over again she has seen all her Radical and Republican friends plunge into the mire of corruption and has thus, bourgeois though she is, acquired a remarkable sympathy for Socialists. She has one unshakeable conviction, however, and that is that J. Guesde is Marx's son-in-law.

Yesterday I sent you another excerpt from one of her articles.[9]

Louise has been especially gratified by the unequivocal rejection of the petitions of the Women's Union—see Clara Zetkin's article in the supplement to Thursday's Vorwärts.[10] Clara is right and did after all manage to get the article accepted in the teeth of long and determined opposition. Bravo Clara!

Love from Louise and Ludwig and the baby who always yells with glee whenever the Arbeiter-Zeitung arrives, and from

Yours,

F.E.

  1. ↑ On 23 January 1895 Victor Adler wrote to Engels that the publication of the Arbeiter-Zeitung 'was making very good progress': as many as 14,000 copies were being printed daily instead of the planned 10,000, while on Sundays the circulation reached 22,000 copies.
  2. ↑ Engels means the Liberal Party's Right Wing akin to the Conservatives and expressing the interests of big industrial, commercial and financial bourgeoisie.
    In 1893 the Gladstone cabinet tabled a second edition of the draft Home Rule Bill (see Note 77) which riled the Liberal Party's Right Wing. Having declared themselves 'independent', the Right-Wingers actually sided with the Conservatives.
  3. ↑ A reference to the second electoral reform of 1867 in Britain. Town residents—house-owners and tenants who had been resident for not less than a year and whose annual rent was not under £10—received voting rights. In counties the property qualification was reduced to £12 of rent per annum. As a result, the number of eligible voters increased more than twofold (with voting rights being granted to part of industrial workers).
  4. ↑ Home Rule—the demand for Irish self-government within the British Empire, as put forward by the Irish liberal bourgeoisie in the 1870s. Home Rule provided for an independent Irish parliament and national bodies of government. However, the British government was to retain the key positions in Ireland.
  5. ↑ of the Arbeiter Zeitung
  6. ↑ On 27 December 1894 Victor Adler wrote in his letter to Engels about his plans to have the Arbeiter-Zeitung publish the article 'Karl Marx in Wien' and asked if Engels could help him with the material for it. He also said he had found some of the data in the newspaper Der Radikale published in 1848 by Alfred Julius Becher.
    On 24 January 1895, the Arbeiter-Zeitung published Max Bach's article 'Karl Marx in Wien" which drew upon the facts supplied by Engels (see also this volume, p. 434).
  7. ↑ Engels refers to an article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung (No. 26) on 26 January 1895 in which the editors reported the confiscation of the paper's evening issue of 24 January and stated that since a larger part of the confiscated circulation had nevertheless reached the subscribers, a repeated publication of the issue was not necessary.
  8. ↑ Engels refers to the Draft of a Law on amendments and addenda to the Criminal Code, the Military Criminal Code and the legislation on the press ('Der Entwurf eines Gesetzes, betreffend Änderungen und Ergänzungen des Strafgesetzbuchs, des Militärstrafgesetzbuchs und des Gesetzes über die Presse), known for short as the Subversion Bill ('Umsturzvollage'). It envisaged harsh punishment for 'the intention to effect an overthrow of the existing state system' even in the absence of a criminal act, and also for an encroachment on religion, monarchy, matrimony and property. The government tabled the draft law in the Reichstag in December 1894, but the top German legislature rejected it in May 1895.
  9. ↑ This excerpt from Emily Crawford's report in The Weekly Dispatch of 27 January 1895 was published by the Arbeiter-Zeitung (No. 32) on 1 February 1895 in Louise Freyberger's article 'Zur Charakteristik des neuen Präsidenten'.
  10. ↑ On 9 January 1895 the newspaper Vorwärts published an appeal of the Union of Women's Societies to the German women 'of all classes and all parties' urging them to sign a petition to the Reichstag and Landtags to concede women the right of association and assembly in those German lands where they had not yet this right. Writing in Vorwärts on 24 January 1895, Clara Zetkin ran a sharp critique of this appeal on the grounds that it lacked a class approach. She stressed that 'the women's question ought to be considered only in the context of the total social question' and called on the proletarian women not to put their signatures on the petition.