Works of Karl Marx 1871
Source: The Eastern Post, No. 169, December 23, 1871
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.
Sir, — In his last epistle to you, Mr. Charles Bradlaugh makes the report of the sitting of the General Council of December 12th — a sitting from which I was absent in consequence of illness — the pretext for discharging upon me his ruffianism. He says,
“I feel indebted to Karl Marx for his enmity.”
My enmity to Mr. Charles Bradlaugh! Ever since the publication of the “Address on the Civil War in France,” Mr. Bradlaugh’s voice has chimed in with the world-wide chorus of slander against the “International” and myself. I treated him, like the other revilers, with contemptuous silence. This was more than the grotesque vanity of that huge self-idolater could stand. I “calumniated” him because I took no notice of his calumnies. My silence drove him mad; in a public meeting he denounced, me as a Bonapartist because, in the “Address on the Civil War,” I had, forsooth, laid bare the historic circumstances that gave birth to the Second Empire. He now goes a step further and transforms me into a police agent of Bismarck. Poor man! He must needs show that the lessons he has recently received at Paris from the infamous Emile de Girardin and his clique are not lost upon him. For the present, I shall “betray him” to the German public by giving the greatest possible circulation to his epistle. If he be kind enough to
clothe his libels in a more tangible shape, I shall “betray him” to an English law-court.
I am, Sir,
Yours obediently,
Karl Marx
London, December 20th