It is high time I wrote again. ’ve been prevented from doing so 
by all kinds of domesticities. 

Enclosed 1 letter from Levy to me, from Düsseldorf. The 
Touroute mentioned in: the letter is a French ex-colonel. He called 

yesterday while I was out and so I shall not be seeing him for 
several days as he has gone to Liverpool. He had a longish 
conversation with my wife, the quintessence of which is contained 
in enclosure 2,°° composed by Madame herself. The M. mentioned 
in Levy’s letter is Miquel. 

In a few days’ time you will receive Igor,’ which has now 
arrived; Russian-German; the Buvr Boox*; Destrilhes, Confidences 
sur la Turquie and a cutting from L’Homme, which I have mislaid 
and hence cannot send today, viz. a letter from a déporté in 
Cayenne, Tassilier by name, to M. le Ministre de la Marine,” in 
which the frightful abominations to which Boustrapa* subjects the 
deportees are revealed.*! You would have had the Bive Boox long 
ago but d’abord the pressure of daily events. has several times 
compelled me to suspend work on my articles“ on this subject and 
write about other themes, so that I was unable to do without the 
book. Then the friends whom you know arrived. They wanted to 
have the novetty just for one day, and had not yet returned it a 
week later. 

As To THESE Kars papers, The Times, in three fulminating Leapers,° 
gave a rehash of the section covering August 1854 to about 
February 1855, i.e. did not so much as touch on the really interesting 
and crucial period. The object of this is, of course, to shift all 
RESPONSIBILITY from the Ministry onto Redcliffe and the Turkish 
pashas in Asia. The best of it is that the English government, as 
you will see from Destrilhes, forcibly kept at the helm Redcliffe’s 
rotten Turkish ministry, thus partly condoning and _ partly 
bringing about the abominations of which Williams complains. 
That, however, is only a minor matter. By a procedure similar to 
the one used in Stieber’s case‘—namely, by producing proof of 
FALSIFIED DATES AND FORGED passages—I have, in my view, proved 
irrefutably that the responsibility for planning the fall of Kars and 
for the systematic execution of that plan, lay with the British 
GOVERNMENT, which furthermore had the good fortune this time to 
figure in Bonaparte’s eyes as zealous ‘in the cause’. I have not, or 
COURSE, gone into the military aspect proper, i.e. the DEFENCE oF Kars; 
I have some miscivincs, however, about the ‘stature’ of Williams. 

4 Papers Relative to Military Affairs in Asiatic Turkey, and the Defence and Capitulation 
of Kars - » F. A. Hamelin - © first of all - 4 A series of articles entitled The Fall of 
Kars which Marx was writing for The People’s Paper. It was based on his article of 
the same title written for the New-York Daily Tribune. - ¢ ‘The Capitulation of Kars’, 
The Times, Nos. 22320, 22322 and 22323, 20, 22 and 24 March 1856. - £ Marx refers 
to his pamphlet Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. 

3 

Jones, to whom I have shown my manuscript, intends 1F 
POSSIBLE—i.e. if he can get together enough money to take St. 
Martin’s Hall*?—to vecrure on the rat or Kars at the said venue 
before the debate on it in Parliament begins. 

*There is now going on a bitter controversy between the 
Chartists and the Urquhartites at Newcastle upon Tyne, London, 
Birmingham, and several other places.**” As you will have heard, 
Jones, with Finlen for shadow, has proclaimed himself dictator of 
Chartism and set up a new organisation which, INDEED, is in process 
of growing but has, on the other hand, evoked a great storm of 
indignation against him.* 

The ‘speculation upon speculation’—not in ideas but in shares— 
which has invaded the Rhine Province and Berlin from France 
would appear to be proliferating as viciously there as on the other 
side of the Rhine. Jeremiads about this social miscuier, this 
infatuation, are appearing in the Ministry’s Preussische Correspon- 
denz, in which the imminence of an ‘inevitable’ and peneral 
financial crisis 1s SERIOUSLY AND EMPHATICALLY hinted at. 

You will know about Heine’s death, but not about Ludwig 
Simon of Trier pissing—passing water, I mean—on his grave in 
the New York Neue Zeit run by Lowe, quondam lion” of the 
Parliament of the ‘Cherman’ Nation“ after its retreat to Stuckert.‘ 
This poet or minnesinger of the female Yid, Madame 
Hohenscheisse-esche or-linden of Frankfurt am Main, is naturally 
of the opinion that Heine was no poet; he had ‘no sensibility’, was 
full of ‘malevolence’ and calumniated not only Kobes I,‘ but even 
Berne’s* lady friend, the great Berne’s ‘mouse’, muse or moose— 
the Strauss woman! 

Down here there is a society FOR THE PROTECTION OF SMALL TRADESMEN. 
This society publishes a weekly rag for the said protection. In that 
weekly our friend Seiler ‘along with his wife’ is pilloried as a 
“SWINDLER’. 

Bur greater things are afoot. Pieper, thanks to his genius, has 
again been living a freebooter’s existence since January and, 
despite the not inconsiderable sussin1es provided by me, has been 
daily on the qui vive vis-a-vis his LanpLtapy. Now it has suddenly 
occurred to him that all he requires to become a great man is a 

@ a venue of public gatherings in London. The inaugural meeting of the International 
Working Men’s Association was held there in September 1864. ->b Lowe von 
Calbe - ¢ Stuttgart (Marx deliberately uses this word and a number of others in this 
paragraph in their South German dialectal form). - 4 Nickname of Jakob Venedey 
under which he was ridiculed by Heine in his poem ‘Kobes I’ (Kobes means Jakob in 
the Cologne dialect). - ¢ Ludwig Bérne - f Jeanette Wohl-Straus. Heine described 
Borne’s relations with her in his ‘Ludwig Borne’. - 8 Protection for Trade 

little capital. Seiler’s sisrerin-taw, the greengrocer’s 2nd daughter, a 
tallow-candle in green spectacles, has long been mortally in love 
with the said Pieper. Her entire person green like verdigris rather 
than veg., and Greens to boot without ANy MEAT OF FLESH WHATEVER. 
While declaring her to be ugly as the day, Pieper has nevertheless 
discovered that she is not without intelligence, of which she gives 
incontrovertible proof by regarding our Hanoverian lambkin as a 
German Byron manqué. So, the day before yesterday, therefore, 
Pieper, to whom this person clings, not simply like a burr but like 
a CATERPILLAR, resolved to pour out his heart to Seiler’s father-in- 
law. He did not wish to do so in front of his ‘beloved’ for fear he 
might have to kiss her, which indeed is Harp work for an occidental 
unaccustomed To FEED UPON TALLOw. But in true Pieper-fashion, the 
declaration of love was combined with—a touch for a loan. Pieper 
could not disburden his heart to the Greencrocer without inviting 
the greengrocer to disburden his rockers, not to say his till. On the 
grounds, that is, of his needing a little capital, say 2040 pounps, To 
CREATE HIMSELF A POSITION aS a FASHIONABLE tutor. Meanwhile he intends 
to let his ‘beloved’ enjoy the pleasures of widowhood while still 
betrothed, nor will his compassion ever permit him to marry her. 
Greens or no Greens, the whole business is most unsavoury, but 
Pieper imagines he will come out of it as a man of honour, i.e. ara 
CERTAIN EPOCH LOOMING IN THE FUTURE repay down to the last farthing the 
advances he ‘hopes’ to obtain from his would-be father-in-law, 
generously leaving him his daughter into the bargain. Since that 
fateful day he has been back to my house only once, for a minute, 
while I was out. Called himself a ‘happy man’. Little Jenny called 
him ‘BeENeEDICK THE MARRIED MAN’,” but little Laura said: ‘BENEDICK was A