Letter to Collet Dobson Collet, March 7, 1860

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MARX TO COLLET DOBSON COLLET

IN LONDON

Manchester, 7 March 1860
6 Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road

My dear Sir,

Having been absent from here for a few days, I was prevented answering your letter immediately.

As to the Printers' Bill, which I had taken the liberty to ask you for in a letter addressed to you on the 6th of February (if I am not mistaken), you have forgotten transmitting it to me. Pray, send it to Mrs Marx.

As to Schaible's declaration (extorted by my proceedings against Blind), it will be sufficient to remark:

1st) Whether Blind be the literary author of the fly-sheet, is a question I have not to deal with. He is the author in the legal sense of the word.

Schaible's declaration (which 'circumstances', he says in the Telegraph, prevented him for three months from making, but which I extorted in no time by sending to Louis Blanc a copy of the two Affidavits at the Bowstreet Police-Court) proves much against Vogt. It proves nothing for Blind. It does not exculpate him in any respect. He has written (if not drawn up) the manuscript; he has printed it in Hollinger's office; he paid Hollinger's Printer's Bill; he made two false declarations in the Augsburg Gazette; he and Hollinger entered into conspiracy against me in order to induce (and with what success you know) the compositor Wiehe to give them false evidence. This is not all. Blind, as you know from the letter he addressed in September to Liebknecht, had the cool impudence of stating that he had nothing at all to do with the whole affair. Lastly, all the successive steps now taken by him and Schaible were forced upon him by the menace suspended over his head for a criminal action for 'conspiracy'.

2) Dr Schaible may, for aught I know, have allowed himself to be made Blind's scape-goat. He, as I know, belongs so to say to the household furniture of Blind's.

3) The principal political end I aimed at, has been obtained by Schaible's declaration. It makes void and annuls the proceedings at Augsburg,—mere mock proceedings; there being present no witnesses, no accuser, no (real) accused, and, in point of fact, no tribunal, since Vogt, in his wisdom, had appealed not to that description of Bavarian tribunal which, according to the Bavarian law, had to decide on the case. In respect to this same Vogt, it will suffice to say that at Geneva, his own place of residence, a Swiss paper (Die Neue Schweizer Zeitung, The New Swiss Gazette, in its number of November 12, 1859) has declared to have indignantly repulsed Vogt's attempt at bribing it with French money. That same paper, in a leading article, called upon Vogt to take judicial proceedings against itself, same way as I, in a declaration signed with my name, and published in the Augsburg Gazette and the Hamburg 'Reform', had called upon him to sue the Volk at London. Vogt, although a Genevese Ständerath and, therefore, a public servant, rested mute to these appeals, while enlisting the favour of the stupid German Liberals by the Augsburg comedy, or rather farce.

You will be so kind to consider this letter as confidential, since the lawyers who carry on my actions for libel at Berlin and London, think it fit that, except on the most urgent emergency, I should not break my silence until after the judicial proceedings have been closed.

Yours faithfully

K. Marx