Letter to Friedrich Engels, July 18, 1877

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To Engels in Ramsgate

[London,] 18 July 1877

DEAR FRED,

First, as regards Wiede, I shall reply to him saying that in my present state of health I am not in a position (which is indeed the case) to interest myself in any periodical as a contributor.

It would certainly be very pleasant if a really scientific socialist journal were to be published. It would provide an opportunity for criticisms or counter-criticisms in which we could discuss theoretical points, expose the utter ignorance of professors and lecturers and at the same time enlighten the minds of the general public--working class or bourgeois. But Wiede's periodical cannot possible be anything but sham-scientific; the same half-educated Knoten and dilettante literary men who make the Neue Welt, Vorwärts, etc., unsafe, necessarily form the majority of his collaborators. Ruthlessness --the first condition of all criticism--is impossible in such company; besides which constant attention has to be paid to making things easily comprehensible, i.e., exposition for the ignorant. Imagine a journal of chemistry where the readers' ignorance of chemistry is constantly assumed as the fundamental presupposition. And apart from all that, the way the people who are necessarily Wiede's collaborators have behaved in the Dühring incident imposes the precaution of keeping oneself as separate from these gentlemen as political party conditions allow. Their motto seems to be: Whoever criticises his opponent by abusing him is a man of feeling, but whoever defames his opponent by genuine criticism is an unworthy character.

I trust that the Russians’ impudent goings-on beyond the Balkans will stir up the Turks against their old regime. The fact that the Russian defeats in European Turkey are leading straight to revolution in Russia has now been made plain even to Lavrov and Lopatin by the outbursts in the Russian press following the FAILURES in Armenia, outbursts which no censorship could have suppressed. The tone of the Petersburg newspapers is more menacing than that of the German press at the time when the siege of Paris was not proceeding as expected.

For a few days during the past week and the early part of this one, my insomnia and a correspondingly chaotic condition of the cranial nerves assumed serious dimensions. Yesterday it started to get better again.

With kindest regards from family to family

Your

Moor