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This letter was prompted by a libellous article published anonymously in the Concordia, No. 10, March 7, 1872. The author was the German bourgeois economist Luigi Brentano, who sought to discredit Marx as a scientist by accusing him of misquoting the sources. On March 30, Liebknecht sent Engels the relevant copy of the Concordia and insisted on a reply to it in Der VolksstaaL Marx’s reply appeared in Der Volksstaat on June 1, and the Concordia responded with another article by Brentano, again published anonymously, to which Marx answered with an article in Der Volksstaat, No. 63, August 7, 1872 (see this volume, pp. 190-97). After Marx’s death, the accusation was repeated by the English bourgeois economist Sedley Taylor. The allegation that Marx had misquoted the sources was completely refuted by his daughter Eleanor in two letters to the To-Day journal in February and March 1884 and by Engels in the Preface to the fourth German edition of Capital in June 1890 and in the pamphlet Brentano contra Marx, published in 1891.

TO THE EDITORS OF DER VOLKSSTAAT

A friend has sent me, from Germany, Concordia. Zeitschrift für die Arbeiterfrage, No. 10, dated March 7, in which this “organ of the German Manufacturers’ Association” publishes an editorial entitled “How Karl Marx Quotes”.

In the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association I quote, amongst other material, a portion of Gladstone’s budget speech of April 16, 1863, which is not contained in Hansard’s semi-official report of parliamentary debates. On this basis, with comfortable manufacturers’ logic the Concordia concludes: “This sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone’s speech”, and jubilates in the fullness of its heart with this mocking sentence in manufacturers’ German, printed in mocking bold face:

“Marx has added the sentence lyingly, both in form and in content.”

It would, in fact, be extremely strange if the Inaugural Address, originally printed in English in London under Gladstone’s very eyes, had placed in his mouth a sentence interpolated by me, a sentence that, for seven and a half years, circulated unchallenged in the London press, to be finally detected by the “learned men” of the German Manufacturers’ Association in Berlin.

The sentence in question of the Inaugural Address reads as follows:

“THIS INTOXICATING AUGMENTATION OF WEALTH AND POWER IS ENTIRELY CONFINED TO CLASSES OF PROPERTY” (P. 6, INAUGURAL ADDRESS etc.). (In the German translation literally: “Diese berauschende Vermehrung von Reichtum und Macht ist ganz und gar beschränkt auf Eigentumsklassen.“)

In an article in The Fortnightly Review (November 1870), which attracted great attention and was discussed by all the London press, Mr. Beesly, Professor of History at the university here, quoted as follows, p. 518:

“AN INTOXICATING AUGMENTATION OF WEALTH AND POWER, AS MR. GLADSTONE OBSERVED, ENTIRELY CONFINED TO CLASSES OF PROPERTY.“ (In the German translation: “Eine berauschende Vermehrung von Reichtum und Macht, wie Herr Gladstone bemerkte, ganz und gar beschränkt auf Eigentumsklassen.“)

Yet Professor Beesly’s article appeared six years later than the Inaugural Address! Good! Let us now take a specialised publication, intended solely for the City and published not only before the appearance of the Inaugural Address, but even before the International Working Men’s Association was founded. It is entitled: THE THFORY OF EXCHANGES. THE BANK CHARTER ACT OF 1844. London 1864, published by T. Cautley Newby, 30, Welbeck Street. It examines Gladstone’s budget speech at length and p. 134 gives the following quotation from this speech:

“THIS INTOXICATING AUGMENTATION OF WEALTH AND POWER IS ENTIRELY CONFINED TO CLASSES OF PROPERTY.” (In the German translation: “Diese berauschende Vermehrung von Reichtum und Macht ist ganz und gar beschränkt auf Eigentumsklassen”),

that is, word for word, exactly what I quoted.

This proves irrefutably that the German Manufacturers’ Association “lied both inform and in content” in decrying this “sentence” as a fabrication “by me”!

Incidentally: honest old Concordia printed in bold face another passage, in which Gladstone prattled about an elevation of the English working class, over the last 20 years, that was supposedly “extraordinary and unparalleled in all countries and in all periods”. The bold-face type is supposed to indicate that I had suppressed this passage. On the contrary! In the Inaugural Address I emphasised most strongly the screaming contrast between this shameless phrase and the “APPALLING STATISTICS”, as Professor Beesly rightly calls them, contained in the official English reports on the same period.*

The author of the THEORY OF EXCHANGES quoted, like myself, not from Hansard, but from a London newspaper which, on April 17, published the April 16 budget speech. In my collectanea of cuttings for 1863, I have searched in vain for the relevant extract and thus, also, for the name of the newspaper that published it. This is, however, not important. Although the parliamentary reports of the London newspapers always differ from one another, I was certain that none of them could completely suppress such a striking quotation from Gladstone. So I consulted The Times of April 17, 1863—it was then, as now, Gladstone’s organ—and there I found, on p. 7, column 5, in the report on the budget speech:

“THAT IS THE STATE OF THE CASE AS REGARDS THE WEALTH OF THIS COUNTRY. I MUST SAY FOR ONE, I SHOULD LOOK ALMOST WITH APPREHENSION AND WITH PAIN UPON THIS INTOXICATING AUGMENTATION OF WEALTH AND POWER, IF IT WERE MY BELIEF THAT IT WAS CONFINED TO CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES. THIS TAKES NO COGNIZANCE AT ALL OF THE CONDITION OF THE LABOURING POPULATION. THE AUGMENTATION I HAVE DESCRIBED, AND WHICH IS FOUNDED, I THINK, UPON ACCURATE RETURNS, IS AN AUGMENTATION ENTIRELY CONFINED TO CLASSES OF PROPERTY.”

In the German translation: “So steht’s mit dem Reichtum dieses Landes. Ich für meinen Teil würde beinahe mit Besorgnis und mit Pein auf diese berauschende Vermehrung von Reichtum und Macht blicken, wenn ich sie auf die wohlhabenden Klassen beschränkt glaubte.** Es ist hier gar keine Notiz genommen von der arbeitenden Bevölkerung. Die Vermehrung, die ich beschrieben habe” (which he now characterised as “diese berauschende Vermehrung von Reichtum und Macht”) “ist ganz und gar beschränkt auf Eigentumsklassen”.

So, on April 16, 1863, Mr. Gladstone declared “both inform and in content” in the House of Commons, as reported in his own organ, The Times, on April 17, 1863 that “this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to the classes possessed of property”, and his apprehension gives him a sort of shiver, but only because of his scruples that this was confined to one part of this class, the part in really easy circumstances.

Italiam, Italiam! Finally we arrive at Hansard. In its edition, here botchily corrected, Mr. Gladstone was bright enough clumsily

* Other whimsical apologetics from the same speech are dealt with in my work Capital (p. 638, 639).

** The words “EASY CLASSES”, “CLASSES IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES” were apparently first introduced BY Wakefield for the really rich portion of the propertied class [E. G. Wakefield, England and America. A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations, Vols. MI, London, 1833].

to excise the passage that would be, after all, compromising on the lips of an English Chancellor of the Exchequer. This is, incidentally, traditional English parliamentary practice, and by no means the invention of little Lasker versus Bebel. A careful comparison of Gladstone’s speech itself, as it appeared in The Times, and its subsequent form, as distorted by the same Gladstone, would provide an amusing description of this unctuous, phrase-mongering, quibbling and strictly-religious bourgeois hero, who timidly displays his piousness and his liberal ATTITUDES OF MIND.

One of the most infuriating things in my work Capital consists in the masses of official proof describing how manufacturers work, something in which no scholar could previously find a thing wrong. In the form of a rumour this even reached the ears of the gentlemen of the German Manufacturers’ Association, but they thought:

“Was kein Verstand der Verständigen sieht,

Das übet in Einfalt ein kindlich’ Gemüt.”

No sooner said than done. They find a suspicious-looking quotation in the Inaugural Address and turn for information to a business friend in London, the first best Mundella, and he, being a manufacturer himself, rushes to despatch overseas, in black and white, the extract from Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. Now they have my fabrication secret. I manufacture not only the text, but the quotations too. Drunk with victory, they trumpet out to the world “How Karl Marx Quotes!” So my wares were discredited, once and for all, and, as is fitting for manufacturers, in the way of normal business, without the expense of learned men.

The irksome subsequent events will perhaps teach the Manufacturing Associates that, however well they may know how to fake goods, they are as well fitted to judge literary goods as a donkey is to play the lute.

Karl Marx

London, May 23, 1872