London, 9 April 1863 

Dear Frederick, 

Little Tussy was delighted with the letter and its contents and 
cannot be dissuaded from replying in ‘person’. 

I have known all about Mierostawski’s Plonplonism** for years 
now through J. Ph. Becker and Schily. Anyway, I had deduced it 
even earlier from a book he published during the last Russo- 
Turkish war.* One of the things the magnanimous fellow 
proposed therein was the partition of Germany into 2 countries. 
But I’ve never heard anything of the kind in connection with 
KoScielski. As for M.’s ludicrous vanity and boundless credulity the 
minute his vanity is tickled, Becker sent me a highly comical 
account of it from Italy in 1860. 

Izzy has already brought out 2 more pamphlets about his trial”; 

aL. Mierostawski, De la nationalité polonaise dans l'équilibre européen, Paris, 
1856. - > F. Lassalle, Der Lassallesche Criminalprozess, Zurich, 1863; Das Criminal- 
Urtheil wider mich mit kritischen Randnoten zum Zweck der AUPE NIE EPITETEE RIN 
(Leipzig, 1863]. 

luckily he has not sent them to me. On the other hand, the day 
before yesterday I received his open reply to the central working 
men’s committee for the Leipzig working men’s (read louts’) 
congress.°”> He gives himself all the airs of a future working men’s 
dictator —self-importantly dispensing the phrases he has borrowed 
from us. He solves the wages v. capital problem ‘with delightful 
ease’ (verbotenus*). The workers, that is, are to agitate for general 
suffrage, after which they are to send people like himself into the 
Chamber of Deputies, armed ‘with the naked sword of science’. 
Next they organise workers’ factories, for which the state advances 
the capital and, sy anp By, these institutions spread throughout the 
country. This, at any rate, 1s surprisingly new! Let me quote a 
sentence for you: 

‘If, today, a German labour movement is already discussing the question as to 
whether the association should be conceived in the light of his’ (Schulze-Delitzsch’s) ‘ideas or 
of mine, the merit is largely his; and that is where his true merit lies—a merit which 
cannot be esteemed too highly.... The cordiality with which I acknowledge that merit 
should not prevent us, etc.’ ; 

Ca ira”! 

At the very time when Palmerston was in Glasgow, another 
great man announced his coming, the student Karl Blind. Prior to 
his arrival, he sent an item to the Glasgow North British Mail 
under the heading ‘M. Karl Blind’, beneath which the paper had 
inserted the ominous word ‘Communicaren’. 

This remarkable communiqué—written by himself, like all the items 
about him circulating in the press, and inserted in the paper by that 
. jackass McAdam—opens with the following unique introduction: 

*‘At the present moment when a patriot exile is about to visit Glasgow, for the 
purpose of bringing under public notice the merits of the Polish question, it is fitting 
that a few remarks should be made upon his political career, and more especially so 
from the unfortunate fact that he is comparatively unknown in Scotland. German by 
birth and German by exile, Mr Karl Blind’s efforts have not come so prominently and so 
persistently before Europe as to have gained for him universal admiration from the 
liberating party, or universal execration from the oppressing party. He has hitherto 
stood in that middle way, where he has the honour of being both beloved and hated; but in 
these two contending ranks which have rendered to him their tribute after its kind the 
whole of Europe is not ranged, Mr Karl Blind having the satisfaction of knowing there is 
a third section of his friends who are simply indifferent. He therefore comes before the 

a literally - & Here: It will go. Ca ira—is the refrain of a popular song of the French 
Revolution. 

Scottish public with perhaps less prejudice against him than has been the case with 
most of the distinguished exiles who preceded him’.*? ; 

There follows a short biographical note on the great unknown in 
which Scotland and ‘THE THIRD section’ OF MANKIND are informed that 
the said ‘Mr Karl Blind’ 1s a NATIVE OF BADEN, AND WAS ORIGINALLY, LIKE 
KOSSUTH AND MAZZINI, TRAINED TO THE LAW. That the ‘Baden REVOLUTION’ WaS 
THE RESULT OF HIS PROPAGANDISM, that the ‘Governments or Baden AND THE 
Pararinare’ had sent him to Paris in June ‘ix THE CAPACITY OF DIPLOMATIC 
envoy, etc., and that he acts ‘In that spirit OF COOPERATION WHICH SO 
DISTINGUISHES THE MORE CELEBRATED EXILES! 

Isn’t that ‘naice’”? 

My wife has now been confined to bed for a fortnight and has 
gone almost completely deaf, heaven knows why. Little Jenny has 
had another attack of diphtheria of some sort. If you could send 
me some wine for both of them (Allen wants little Jenny to have 
port), ’d be most grateful. 

Here in London a parson (as distinct from the atheists who 
preach in John Street) has been giving deistic sermons for the 
public, in which he makes Voltairian fun of the Bible. (My wife 
and children went to hear him twice and thought highly of him as 
a humorist). 

I attended a Trane Unions meeting chaired by Bright.°** He had 
very much the air of an Independent**’ and, whenever he said ‘Ix the 
United Srates No KINGs, Xo BisHors’, there waS a Burst oF applause. The 
working men themselves spoke very well indeed, without a trace of 
bourgeois rhetoric or the faintest attempt to conceal their opposition 
to the capitalists (who, by the by, were also attacked by papa Bright). 

How soon the English workers will throw off what seems to be a 
bourgeois contagion remains to be seen. So far as the main theses 
in your book* are concerned, by the by, they have been 
corroborated down to the very last detail by developments 
subsequent to 1844. For I have again been comparing the book 
with the notes I made on the ensuing period. Only your 
small-minded German philistine who measures world history by 
the ell and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news 
items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major 
developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be 
again succeeded by days into which 20 vears are compressed. 

a ‘M. Karl Blind’, North British Daily Mail, 30 March 1863. - > In the original: 
‘scheen’ (instead of ‘schön’). - ¢ See this volume, p. 465. 

Re-reading your work has made me unhappily aware of the 
changes wrought by age. With what zest and passion, what 
boldness of vision and absence of all learned or scientific 
reservations, the subject is still attacked in these pages! And then, 
the very illusion that, tomorrow or the day after, the result will 
actually spring to life as history lends the whole thing a warmth, 
vitality, and humour with which the later ‘grey on grey’ contrasts 
damned unfavourably. 

Salut. 
Your 
K. M.