Letter to Friedrich Engels, April 4, 1854

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MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 4 April 1854 [28 Dean Street, Soho]

Dear Engels,

From Cluss' letter, enclosed herewith, you will see what a worthy trick has been played on him by Dr Kellner and friend Weydemeyer. The latter, instead of enlightening him as to the status quo, has got him into a pretty fix, a service which friend Weydemeyer regularly performs for his friends.

I am delighted about The Daily News. I shall have a look today and see if they've published anything yet. I HOPE, SIR, YOU WILL LEAVE MANCHESTER, SIR, FOR EVER, SIR. One gets horribly used to this SIR (or rather SAR!) when one is compelled to read the parliamentary debates each week, especially THE SPEECHES OF Lord John Russell. The fellow can be boiled down to just the 2 words: 'Now, SAR!'

As you will see from the enclosed, Pieper has received his first bill from Washington, and yesterday evening again acquired lodgings of his own. He now struts around like a turkeycock. Not only earns money, but as an author, and not only as an author, but as a politician! For the time being he has, or at least pretends to have, forsworn London's public PETTICOATS and is on the look-out for some healthy paramour. Social standing no object. Nor yet, perhaps, age. But health. THAT IS THE THING. Experience has taught the good youth to regard the sex from a medical point of view. Depicted in a state of undress, the good youth might serve as a cautionary example. Now that he's under his own steam again, I have told him about your offer to help him should he get a negative answer or a protested bill from Weydemeyer. There could no longer be any harm in giving him your message, but the good youth who, all things considered, is bon garçon, was deeply impressed.

At this particular juncture, just when you have opened fire in The Daily News, it is vital you shouldn't leave me in the lurch over the Tribune. Otherwise the fellows, nettled as they are by my recent statement, and likewise readers of The Daily News, might well believe that now—when all the newspapers are anxious to make a splash with their military stuff—I am selling THE BETTER PART OF MYSELF in London and the OFFAL in New York. The fellows would be capable of chucking me out, seeing that they already have one correspondent here and one in Liverpool. Their paper would be somewhat the worse for it, but £200 to the good which, after all, is worth the trouble. Hence what is necessary above all is to tempt them once more into printing a military article as a LEADER. Then I can again be sure of them. In one of its recent issues the N. Y. Herald ridicules the 'MILITARY EDITOR OF THE TRIBUNE for prescribing a plan of campaign for Omer Pasha and crying treason now that it is not carried out.

Palmerston in Three Epochs by Washington Wilks. This book consists of two epochs. In the first, Washington Wilks has most blatantly and stupidly cribbed from my articles in the Tribune. The second is a longer version of the chapter on Hungary from Urquhart's Progress of Russia, padded out with the help of 'Blue Books'. Wretched though the concoction is and betraying at every turn the fellow's total lack of knowledge—true plagiarist's ignorance—it has nevertheless enabled him to shoulder his way into the London MEETINGS, to gain the protection of Urquhart and his clique and to set himself up in London as a 'PUBLIC CHARACTER'. The idea of 'betrayal' by the Ministry is beginning to spread among the philistines here and, if the fellows venture to play the same game as in 1840 and '46, there may be trouble.

Your

K. Marx