Marx-Engels Correspondence 1869
Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 367;
First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.
Dear Fred,
I send you 1 Pionier, 1 Volksstaat, and various copies of Social-Demokrat.
You will see from the Pionier that Heinzen believes I only wrote Capital so that he should not understand it.
Schweitzer — utilising Liebknecht’s anxiety with regard to his democratic friends — is behaving as though polemics against landed property were the first word in the Lassallean creed! Quelle impudence! Incidentally, Bonhorst did him good service in an issue of the Volksstaat that I cannot find. I don’t know whether you receive the Volksstaat.
Bonhorst’s arrest is good.
There could be nothing more ridiculous than the respectable people’s fear concerning the Queen’s procession today. Everywhere overrun by police as in France. The whole alarm was produced by a hoax. A few agitators have had their fun in the past few weeks, circulating handbills calling on the starving workers of the East End to present themselves en masse to the Queen, and de ne pas laisser passer la reine [not let the Queen pass].
My family has just returned from the spectacle. Icy coldness amongst the public. Madame is said to have stared fuming-mad and ultra-crabby.
I shall send you, in the next few days, a volume I happened to pick up, which contains all sorts of pamphlets on Ireland. Those by Ensor (whom I also quoted in Capital) contain many piquant points. Ensor was a political economist of English origin (his father still lived in England when Ensor was born), Protestant and, despite all this, one of the most resolute Repealers before 1830. Being himself indifferent to religious things, he can defend Catholicism with wit against the Protestants. The first pamphlet in the book is by Arthur O’Connor. I had expected rather more of it, since this O’Connor played an important role in 1798, and I have found good articles by him about Castlereagh’s administration in Cobbett’s Political Register. Tussy should sometime look through Cobbett, for something there about Ireland.
This week Tussy and I lost 3 days putting my workroom in order. It had become jumbled to the frontiers of possibility.
Salut.
Your
K. M.
Tussy sends her best compliments to the family.