Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx 
in London 
Manchester, Thursday, 7 October 1858 

Manchester, 7 Oct. 1858. 
Dear Mohr,

You’ll probably write about the Canning despatch tomorrow, the thing is 
out of my latitude altogether, I’ve been reading the newspapers very 
irregularly of late and have a lot to do, as Ermen has been over there for a 
fortnight and I’ve got the whole sauce on my plate alone. Business here 
is going colossally well; for 6 weeks the spinners have been earning 1d. 
to 1½d. per lb. on coarse and medium counts more than they have earned 
in 3 years, and the unheard-of has happened that the market in yarns here 
rose 1d. before the Liverpool buyers could get more for cotton. 

For 10-12 days there has been some stagnation in the advance, but the 
spinners are all booked for longer periods and demand is still strong 
enough to keep prices fully up. If this goes on for a while longer, the 
movements for wage increases will begin. In France the cotton spinners 
have also been earning more for some time than in recent years (this is 
certain, I have it from a cotton agent who was over there himself); I 
don’t know exactly what things look like in the rest of commerce there, 
but the state of the Bourse speaks for substantial improvement. All this 
looks damned optimistic, and the devil knows how long it will last, if 
there isn’t a good deal of overproduction for India and China. Commerce 
in India must now be flourishing famously; the last but one Bombay mail 
brought sales – for 14 days – of 320,000 pieces of cotton cloth, and the 
latest again 100,000. The fellows have already sold everything for 
forward delivery, of which they had only just learned that it had been 
bought in Manchester and not even shipped yet. India and China seem to 
me, to judge by the talk of the local philistines and the state of the 
market, likely to provide the next pretext for overproduction, and if the 
winter turns out good, it is certainly to be expected that in the spring the 
reckless credit-giving and bill-jobbing will get going merrily again. 

The business with Jones is very disgusting. He has held a meeting here 
and spoken entirely in the spirit of the new alliance. After this business 
one really could almost believe that the English proletarian movement in 
its old, traditional Chartist form must go completely to ruin before it 
can develop in a new, viable form. And yet it is impossible to foresee 
what this new form will look like. For the rest, Jones’s new move, in 
connection with the earlier, more or less successful attempts at such an 
alliance, seems to me in fact to be connected with the fact that the 
English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeoisified, 
so that this most bourgeois of all nations seems finally to aspire to 
having a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the 
bourgeoisie. For a nation that exploits the whole world this is of course 
justified to some extent. Only a couple of really bad years can help 
here, and since the gold discoveries these seem no longer so easy to 
bring about. But I must say that the way in which the overproduced 
mass that called forth the crisis has been absorbed is not in the least 
clear to me; such a rapid ebb of such a violent tidal wave has never 
been witnessed before. 

Through Jones’s manoeuvre Reynolds becomes a prominent person; he 
is the only “educated” man (vulgo “learned”) who still ostensibly sets 
himself up as the representative of the proletariat – au fond just as 
bourgeois as Monsieur Jones now, only in a different way. For him this 
is a godsend. Do send me the promised clippings from his paper. 

Lupus’s leg is still playing up, he still cannot walk fast without ill 
effects, but he can manage a bit again tolerably well. 

The little German poetaster who described his adventures with Kinkel 
& Freiligrath in the Augsburg Gazette last summer is called Isaac Levi, 
alias Julius Rodenberg, and is a schoolmate of Gumpert’s. 

If I possibly can I’ll come over at Christmas. It is splendid that you’re 
going to arrange the money matters with your old lady. I hope this has 
been done or at least secured in the meantime? I am writing to Freiligrath 
today about the bill. 

Warm greetings to your wife and the girls. 

Has the manuscript gone off?