Marx-Engels Correspondence 1857

Marx To Engels
In Manchester


Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 199;
First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.


[London,] 13 November 1857

Dear Engels,

A week ago on Thursday I waited at both the appointed places — which, however, was one too many — from 11 o'clock to 3. Then I gave the whole thing up in despair.

I can write no more than a line or two, the article having left me only a few minutes until posting time. Let me know definitely when I can have ‘Cannon’. It’s a matter of getting the goods off to America at what is (for me) a crucial moment.

Meanwhile I haven’t written a word about India. I have got to have some accurate military stuff on the subject, events having to some extent discredited myself and the Tribune. [referring to Marx’s estimation that a British storming of Delhi could not succeed]

Though my own financial distress may be dire indeed, never, since 1849, have I felt so cosy as during this outbreak. Furthermore you can set Lupus’ mind at rest by telling him that, now that the whole statement is before us, I have written an exhaustive article for the Tribune in which I show, if only on the basis of the table of discount-rates for 1848-54, that the crisis ought by rights to have set in 2 years earlier. Moreover the delays are now explicable in such rational terms that even Hegel might, to his great satisfaction, have rediscovered the ‘concept’ in the ‘empirical diversity of the world of finite interests’.

Salut.

Your
K. M.

Go on sending me, as you started to do, as many Manchester papers as possible. Not only for the Tribune. I am thinking of writing about the crisis for the benefit of the fatherland.