Letter to the Editor of The Daily News, June 1871

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Marx’s letter to the editor of The Daily News was occasioned by this newspaper’s publication on June 26, 1871 of letters by British clergyman John Llewellyn Davies, Benjamin Lucraft, and George Holyoake. George Holyoake again slanderously attacked the Address even after the General Council had made its statement on June 21 (see this volume, pp. 367-68). Lucraft expressed his disagreement with the propositions of the Address and declared his resignation from the General Council. Davies called upon the French Government to start legal proceedings against the General Council for the accusations contained in the Address against Thiers, Favre and others. Marx sent the letter to the editors of The Daily News and The Pall Mall Gazette. The latter published an excerpt from the letter on June 27, 1871. As the editors of The Daily News refused to publish the second part of Marx’s letter, in which he exposed the British bourgeois press, the letter was also sent to The Eastern Post, which published it in full on July 1, 1871.

Sir,—

A Council consisting of more than thirty members cannot, of course, draw up its own documents. It must entrust that task to some one or other of its members, reserving to itself the right of rejecting or amending. The address on the “Civil War in France,” drawn up by myself, was unanimously adopted by the General Council of the International, and is therefore the official embodiment of its own views. With regard, however, to the personal charges brought forward against Jules Favre and Co., the case stands otherwise. On this point the great majority of the Council had to rely upon my trustworthiness. This was the very reason why I supported the motion of another member of the Council that Mr. John Hales, in his answer to Mr. Holyoake should name me as the author of the address. I hold myself alone responsible for those charges, and hereby challenge Jules Favre and Co. to prosecute me for libel. In his letter Mr. Llewellyn Davies says,

“It is melancholy to read the charges of personal baseness so freely flung by Frenchmen at one another.”

Does this sentence not somewhat smack of that pharisaical self-righteousness with which William Cobbett had so often taunted the British mind? Let me ask Mr. Llewellyn Davies which was worse, the French petite presse, fabricating in the service of the police the most infamous slanders against the Communals, dead, captive, or hidden, or the English press reproducing them to this day, despite its professed contempt for the petite presse. I do not consider it a French inferiority that such serious charges for instance as those brought forward against the late Lord Palmerston, during a quarter of a century, by a man like Mr. David Urquhart, could have been burked in England but not in France.