Letter to Karl Marx, December 16, 1882

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

To Marx in Ventnor

London, December 16, 1882

Dear Moor,

Having been interrupted yesterday, I shall continue today. You will have noticed how hurriedly my letter was dashed off— I was being perpetually disturbed by Pumps and BABY, first while revising the ms.,c then while writing the letter. The point about the almost total disappearance of serfdom--legally or actually--in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the most important to me, because formerly you expressed a divergent opinion on this. In the East Elbe region the colonisation proves that the German peasants were free; in Schleswig-Holstein Maurer admits that at that time "all" the peasants had regained their freedom (perhaps rather later than the fourteenth century). He also admits that in South Germany it was just at this period that the bondsmen were best treated. In Lower Saxony more or less the same (e.g., the new Meier [tenant farmers] who were in fact copyholders). He is only opposed to Kindlinger's view that serfdom first arose in the sixteenth century. But that it was newly reinforced after that, and appeared in a second edition, seems to me indubitable. Meitzen gives the dates at which serfs begin to be mentioned again in East Prussia, Brandenburg, Silesia: the middle of the sixteenth century; Hanssen gives the same for Schleswig-Holstein. When Maurer calls this a milder form of serfdom he is right in comparison with the ninth and eleventh centuries, when the old Germanic slavery still continued, and right too with regard to the legal powers which the lord also had then and later--according to the law books of the thirteenth century--over his serfs. But compared with the actual position of the peasants in the thirteenth, the fourteenth and, in North Germany, the fifteenth centuries, the new serfdom was anything but an alleviation. Especially after the Thirty Years' War! It is also significant that while in the Middle Ages the degrees of servitude and serfdom are innumerable, so that the Mirror of Saxony gives up any attempt to speak of egen lüde recht [rights over owned people--i.e., bondsmen] this becomes remarkably simple after the Thirty Years' War. Enfin, I look forward to hearing your opinion.

It was also Pumps’ fault if, at the place where I mention Russian common ownership, I failed to paste on a note saying that this information came from you.

The enclosed is from old Becker; luckily I was able to respond to his gentle nudging straight away and send him £ 5 , as I had just sold some SHARES and the money had been paid on the same day.

Herewith 2 Egalités— hope they’ll be delivered tomorrow — from which you will see that Lafargue was immediately released and was expected back in Paris yesterday evening.

Hartmann’s battery : so long as he only plugged in the galvanometer, in which the resistance is represented by a very long wire so that there is only a gradual consumption of electro-mechanical power, all went well. But as soon as he plugged in the lamp in which the resistance is concentrated at one point, namely the thin, short, incandescent wire, that was that; the hydrogen immediately polarised the silver electrode, and the weak current produced only a faint red glow in the wire. Now his head is again full of all manner of innovations, each of which proves that he is looking for the difficulty in the wrong place. But whether the gents who are advancing the money will agree to any further experiments is a moot point.

Do you think you might be able to book a couple of beds down there for Schorlemmer and myself in the first week of January? We would not be at all averse to nipping down for a day or two, if nothing intervenes. But that something will intervene is all too probable in view of Schorlemmer’s rheumatism, etc. However, if we knew that you could arrange for us to stay either with you or close by, and exactly how much notice we should have to give you, we could make our arrangements accordingly.

Your

F. E.