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Letter to Karl Marx, December 8, 1882
Published abridged in Marx and Engels Correspondence; International Publishers (1968);
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46
To Marx in Ventnor
London, December 8, 1882[edit source]
Dear Moor,
What happened about the Prolétaire was this: when I recently sent you a parcel of Egalités and Kölnische Zeitungs, I also meant to send you the TRADES UNION Prolétaire and supposed I had included it. Somebody was in the room while I was packing up the parcel and
I did this rather hurriedly. Finding next day that the TRADES UNION ProlĂ©taire was still here, but not the other containing the Saint-Etienne skulduggery, I thought I must have sent it you twice over. Now, looking around by the light of day, I have found it â still in the original wrapper in which you returned it, this being undoubtedly the reason why I couldnât find the same.
From your postcard to Tussy, I see that you are still confined to the house â which is all to the good considering the snow weâre getting and the wet slush on the ground; but no doubt we shall soon have better weather (not the very best, but better than at present). During your first winter in the north since your attack of pleurisy you will have to resign yourself to tracheal affections of a milder kind; only next summerâs cure will be able to scotch those.
In order finally to get clear about the parallel between the Germans of Tacitus[1] and the American Redskins I have made some gentle extractions from the first volume of your Bancroft.[2] The similarity is indeed all the more surprising because the method of production is so fundamentally different--here hunters and fishers without cattle-raising or agriculture, there nomadic cattle-raising passing into agriculture. It just proves how at this stage the type of production is less decisive than the degree in which the old blood bonds and the old mutual community of the sexes within the tribe have been dissolved. Otherwise the Thlinkeets in the former Russian America could not be the exact counterpart of the Germanic tribes--even more so really than your Iroquois. Another riddle solved there is how the fact that the women are burdened with the main mass of the work is quite consistent with great respect for women. Moreover I have found my suspicion confirmed that the Jus PrimĂŠ Noctis [right to the first night] originally found in Europe among the Celts and the Slavs, is a remnant of the old sexual community: it subsists in two tribes, widely separated and of different races, for the medicine-man as the representative of the tribe. I have learned a great deal from the book, and with regard to the Germanic tribes enough for the time being. Mexico and Peru I must reserve for later on. I have given back the Bancroft but have taken the rest of Maurer's things, which are therefore now all at my place. I had to look through them on account of my concluding note on the Mark, which will be rather long and with which I am still dissatisfied although I have rewritten it two or three times. After all it is no joke to summarise its rise, flourishing and decay in eight or ten pages. If I can possibly get the time I will send it to you in order to hear your opinion. And I myself would like to be quit of the stuff and get back to the natural sciences.
It is funny to see from the so-called primitive peoples how the conception of holiness arose. What is originally holy is what we have taken over from the animal kingdom--the bestial; "human laws" are as much of an abomination in relation to this as they are in the gospel to the divine law.
Hartmannâs installation of his battery for lighting 6 Swan lamps (incandescent bulbs Ă 6 candle-power) was supposed to have been ready yesterday, but I donât know whether it succeeded or not.
I shall draw Bernsteinâs attention to SaarbrĂŒcken, as I have already done before. But the Anti-Socialist Law will make material hard to come by there. Even prior to that, every effort was made to keep this area undefiled.
Egalité by the second post. Lafargue is still at liberty since it was he who addressed it to me.
Apropos TRADES UNION DEPUTATION: When, at the meeting of the Possibilists, the French had sung the Marseillaise in their honour, the virtuous Shipton and his mates thought fit to retort by singing in unison âGOD SAVE THE QUEEN!â This according to the Kölnische Zeitung which I sent to Laura.
Well, I wish your throat, no less than the weather, a good recovery.
Your
F.E.