Letter to Karl Marx, December 18, 1860

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Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 18 December 1860


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41
Keywords : Letter, Karl Marx


ENGELS TO MARX

IN LONDON

Manchester, 18 December 1860

Dear Moor,

In addition to Szemere, my brother-in-law[1] also descended on me on Sunday. Sz. is off to Liverpool today and may return; my brother-in-law leaves tomorrow—so I've been in no position to do an article. Something on Austria[2] for Saturday[3] if possible.

As a person, Sz. is quite a decent chap; he has an Austrian's bonhomie and, at a time of revolution in Hungary, might even be energetic, resolute and clearsighted; but en dehors de son pays[4] he certainly has little in the way of knowledge or ideas. At any rate, I couldn't extract a great deal of sense from him in this respect. It's odd that, having adopted such a decidedly Bonapartist stance in his pamphlet,[5] he should now have performed a complete volte-face. He made me, inter alia, the following conciliatory proposal: What, he inquired, would my attitude be if, given the disintegration of the Empire, the Habsburgs were to remain merely Kings of Hungary, and German Austria revert to Germany?e Whereupon I told him, of course, that such a solution might be perfectly acceptable to us and that we would gladly make the Hungarians a present of the whole robber band. His negotiations regarding the wine business here went off quite well. Cobden's recommendations and the acquaintances he struck up chez Cobden in Paris have made things much easier for him.

If at all possible, I shall send you another two pounds tomorrow; unfortunately it's too late today.

Regards to your wife, who is getting better, I hope, and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Apropos port! I've none left that's drinkable, but shall try and lay my hands on some decent stuff tomorrow and send it off straight away.

  1. ↑ Karl Emil Blank
  2. ↑ Engels wrote 'Austria—Progress of the Revolution'
  3. ↑ 22 December
  4. ↑ outside of his own country
  5. ↑ B. Szemere, La Question hongroise (1848 1860), Paris, 1860. See this volume, p. 230.
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