Manchester, 8 February 1870 
86 Mornington Street, Stockport Road 

Dear Friends, 

I must apologise very much for having left your letter of 
3 December unanswered until today.*** My only excuse is that I 
wanted to write something really nice, so I had to look around 
first, also in the interests of the cooperative. If I now have no very 
good news, this is, as you will see, not my fault. 

I remember Solingen well from anno 48 and 49. Not only were 
the workers of Solingen at that time the most developed and most 
determined in the Rhine Province, as was also shown by the 
Elberfeld affair; I have a reason to be personally grateful to them, 
since the Solingen column, with which I marched to Elberfeld, 
supported me and guarded me there against the cowardly and 
treacherous Committee of Public Safety of the bourgeois ‘radicals’. 
Had it not been for the Solingers, these bourgeois would have 
bunged me into jail, where I would probably have been left as an 
expiatory sacrifice for the Prussian gentlemen.*” And I know full 
well that, during the whole period of the Lassallean triumphal 
processions, the Solingers did not behave as disciples of the new 
teaching, but as people who had belonged to the socialist 
movement for many years, who could, of course, join the new 
Association,’ but did not need to learn anything from it. And I 
know very well, how, when Lassalle was being idolised as a new 
messiah, Friend Klein had the courage to remind him and the 
workers that the people round the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had 
already contributed something towards the independence of the 
workers.*° 

Thus, it is doubly painful to me that my own means do not 
permit me to give the cooperative a helping hand in a way that 
would be of special use to it. The little money I have is so tied up 
that, with the best will in the world—and certainly for the next 
few years at least—I cannot get at it, not even for my personal 
ends. I can thus only dispose of my income, which is not brilliant 
in the circumstances here. But to show my good will, at least, I 
enclose 50 thaler in one Prussian banknote I. Lit. C. N. 108,126; I 
would ask you to send me the relevant bond title; the interest, 

however, should be credited not to me, but to the reserve fund of 
the cooperative. 

Together with Marx, with whom I have discussed the matter,’ I 
have looked around to see whether we might drum up money for 
the cooperative in some other way. Marx knows some people who 
have means, and who can be assumed to have good will. But the 
man” through whom we would have to manoeuvre this is away for 
a number of months, and until then nothing can be done. We 
intend to do the following: if we succeed in interesting these 
people in the matter, we shall ask them to send somebody to 
Solingen to inspect the state of the cooperative himself. It would 
then be necessary for this person to be shown all the books and 
records and be provided with all the necessary explanations with 
the greatest frankness. Otherwise, you cannot ask people to put 
money into a business and, if I were myself in a position to 
advance a larger sum, then I would come to Solingen and ask for 
the same. In business matters everybody has the duty to look out 
for himself, since anybody can make a mistake, particularly 
somebody who is interested in a certain thing. In addition, such a 
person—who naturally would be a complete stranger to Solin- 
gen—would have to give his word of honour that he would make 
no use of the information thus obtained. And when this person 
has convinced himself of the reliability of the business and the 
trustworthiness of the management, we hope a decent sum will be 
taken up in bonds. 

I naturally give you this simply as our plan of operations, and 
would not like you to set great hopes in it already, as it is clear 
that we cannot just dispose of other people’s money. I would not 
for the world wish the cooperative, basing itself upon such 
prospects, which might come to fruition at the earliest in months, 
or perhaps not at all, let itself in for transactions that would tie up 
its means, and get it into difficulties. I can only promise that we 
shall do our best in this matter, and remain, with best wishes for 
the success of the cooperative and the prosperity of all members, 
with greetings and a handshake 

Frederick Engels 

My address is now as above.