Letter to Karl Marx, January 7, 1861

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To Marx in London

Manchester, 7 January 1861

Dear Moor,

The Revelations will be despatched from here today or tomorrow post-paid to Petsch. The fellow had best stick a small label on the title page — London, A. Petsch & Co., 1861 — so that people know where it is to be had.

Can’t you get me Toby’s cry of pain?

Shall write to Siebel.

In none of the German papers save the Kölnische have I found so much as an advertisement — which is surely odd.

Our old enemies are not escaping the fate they deserve. The editor en chef of the late lamented Strassburger Correspondent was, according to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, “a certain Mr Wolfers of Cologne” — the worthy Wolfers of Dumont’s paper couldn’t you somehow convey this to Biscamp for transmission to the Augsburg A. Z.? Also, that the chap is not a Rhinelander but a beastly Belgian. Schwanbeck dead of delirium tremens, the worthy Brüggemann disappeared and consigned to oblivion, and Wolfers openly in the pay of Bonaparte — what more can you ask?

Doubtless King William I will now make a real ass of himself as well. When he tells the Berliners that much has happened that was unjust, perhaps he is referring to the enforced dismissal of Stieber. Apropos. Another friend, griffin Greif, would appear from a report in the Neue Preussische Zeitung to be gravely ill as the result of an apoplectic fit. It’s a good sign, these chaps being bowled over like ninepins. That the change of monarch should go so nicely hand in hand with the Austrian revolution of all things, is capital. Even the Wochenschrift des Nationalvereins now declares that, unless Prussia moves fairly quickly, Austria will inevitably gain ascendancy in Germany. Things are going famously in Austria. Nothing could be more favourable than that stubbornly irresolute jackass Francis Joseph. Things are going famously and will be getting too much for Mr Bonaparte as well as for Franzl.

In North America things are also hotting up. With the slaves the situation must be pretty awful if the Southerners are playing such a risky game. The least irruption of irregulars from the North might result in a general conflagration. At all events, one way or another, slavery would appear to be rapidly nearing its end and hence also cotton production. What repercussions this will have on England we shall soon see. And with such powerful movements under way, a jackass like Bonaparte thinks he can go on fishing in troubled waters indefinitely.

Many regards,

Your
F. E.