Marx-Engels Correspondence 1864
Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 43;
First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1906-1907 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.
Dear Weiwi,
The whole household and myself were extraordinarily pleased to hear from you and your family again. My wife asserts that she wrote to yours last and is thus expecting to have the first letter back from her.
I am, at the same time, sending you by mail 4 copies of a printed ‘Address’, of which I am the author. The newly established International Workers’ Committee, in whose name it has been put out, is not without significance. Its English members consist chiefly of the heads of the Trade-Unions here in other words, the real worker-kings of London, the same people who organised that gigantic reception for Garibaldi and who, by that monster meeting in St James’s Hall (under Bright’s chairmanship), prevented Palmerston declaring war on the United States, which he was on the point of doing. On the French side, the members are unimportant figures, but they are the direct spokesmen of the leading ‘workers’ in Paris. There is likewise a link with the Italian associations, which recently held their congress in Naples. Although I have been systematically refusing to participate in any way whatsoever in all the ‘organisations’, etc. for years now, I accepted this time because it concerns a matter by means of which it is possible to have a significant influence.
For the past 14 months I have been suffering almost constantly from carbuncles, which often threatened my life. More or less cured now.
Engels will have written to you of the loss of our friend Lupus.
Curiously enough, I received a letter from Berlin last Friday, in which the old Hatzfeldt woman urged me to defend Lassalle against Blind’s ‘Republican Protest’. The next day I received your letter to Engels, containing the much amended American edition of the same garbage. By a third coincidence, I was, at the same time, sent 2 numbers of the Swabian Beobachter (from Stuttgart) which I never see otherwise. In the first number the editor was poking fun at a letter from Mr Blind to the American nation which had been translated from the English by ‘Mr Blind’ and sent to him and to other South German editors; in it, ‘almost at official request’, as he puts it, he gives his inexpert opinion on Lincoln’s election, etc. In the same number, the editor said that one can see from my book attacking Vogt what Blind’s vanity leads to, etc. Whereupon, Blind sent the enclosed reply through his man-of-straw, Dr Bronner of Bradford, 1. setting out just how powerful his influence in America was, and 2. having the impudence to say that the Vogt affair was ‘a put-up-job’. This then enabled me (using your letter and copying the passages relating to Blind) to put out the statement 2 as desired by the old Hatzfeldt woman against that clown, without identifying myself with those aspects of Lassalle’s agitation which are not to my liking. Write soon.
Your
K. Marx
The source of Blind’s boastful epistle which I am copying out for you is No. 268 of the Beobachter (Stuttgart), 17 Nov., 1864.
It is absolutely essential that you write me a few lines, suitable for publication, about Mr Blind’s American influence.