Letter to Friedrich Engels, September 25, 1868

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To Engels in Manchester

London, 25 September 1868

Dear Fred,

By all means do the stuff for Liebknecht as quickly as feasible. Otherwise, the fellow will do it himself and, you may depend upon it, do it badly. It appears to me it would be a good thing if you were also to draw attention to what Bernhard Becker stole from your pamphlet and endorsed, after bitter experience, in his shitty pamphlet. (He cursed us so horribly when he was still ‘President of Humanity’.) You can have the pamphlet right away if you write immediately to Strohn, who took it with him to Bradford.

The time has now come to kick this ‘Lassalleanism’ ‘just for a start’. And there is no need at all to allow B. Becker’s shitty pamphlet to be buried in silence.

The ‘appeal’ the fiery Wilhelmchen speaks of is this: I (i. e. in the name of the International Association, as its Secretary for Germany) must naturally address some general lines to the German workers, now that their relationship to us has changed as a result of their various congress decisions. But no undue haste is necessary in so doing. In all these things ‘more haste, less speed’, and, as we know, our Wilhelmchen has shown no ‘haste’ with the matter for 6-7 years.

Quant à Schweitzer, I had a sort of presentiment that some turning point was looming somewhere. Although my reply to him had therefore been ready for some days — (in which I with schoolmasterly reserve point out to him, in particular, the difference in conditions between a sectarian movement and a real class movement) — I have, nevertheless, held the stuff back. And I will now only answer him after the results are available of his fresh attempt to call a congress in Berlin for forming trades unions. In any case, Schweitzer has learned one thing about me, that the promptness with which I answer his letters is always in inverse proportion to their ‘warmth of feeling’.

Wilhelm has only one copy left of The 18th Brumaire.

How did things go with Vogt’s lectures in the Schiller Institute?

Your
K. M.

Blanqui was in constant attendance during the Brussels Congress.

In a Blue Book about the crisis of 1857, Cardwell, Chairman of the Committee of Inquiry and the most disgusting washerwoman in the Peel-ite clique of old women, asks Dixon (Managing Director of a bank which had failed in Liverpool) whether the Shareholders of the bank had consisted largely of women, parsons and other persons with no knowledge of banking. By no means, Dixon replied, they were mainly ‘Mercantile men’ but, he added very knowingly:

‘The majority of them are people in business, mercantile men, but how far mercantile men can be considered competent to form an opinion on any other business than their own, is rather a question.’

Is that not nice?

Apropos!

Moore should send me Foster’s On Exchange from his lending library, since it is not in the library here. I shall send it back immediately.