24 Oct. 1868. Dear Fred,

Enclosed: 1) letter from Kugelmann. There’s some interesting stuff in it. In any case I’m writing to him that I forbid him pour l’avenir all his eccentrically deferential outbursts of esteem. 2) letter from Liebknecht. This beast seems quite mad. For weeks he has been writing to me that he would place copies of “Vogt” at my disposal. As always with L., that means the matter rests there. Not another word about it. Instead, a mass of silly proposals. I am to answer Faucher at all costs, because L. cannot answer him and F. has admirers in certain Leipzig beer-houses. He wants to “provisionally” and grudgingly refrain from attacks on Schweitzer. As if, on the contrary, he had not very kindly requested me, to honour him, to attack S. provisionally for him. I am to place at his disposal a “florilegium” from Miquel’s private correspondence with me, because M. seems “dangerous” to him. I am to send him Freiligrath’s poem against Kinkel, so that he can restore F. at Kinkel’s expense. Finally, I am to make a certain Stromeyer – (he means Strohn) – in Bradford, by instructions, agent for Ernst Stehfest et Co, Crimmitschau (spinning and weaving cooperative). What else? Fortunately, this time he does not honour me again with the task of buying English mustard specimens here in the City for an alleged consumers’ society in Leipzig and establishing “connections” with the firm. The upshot of the whole business was – in return for the mustard and the business information – the words, the word: The mustard is famos!! This is in fact what the English political economists par excellence call “consumptive demand”. Borkheim, in whom Russophobia (which I had inoculated in him as the mildest illness to divert his superabundant vital spirits) is assuming dangerous dimensions, has now got into a row with old Phil. Becker, because the latter is on good terms with Bakunin and has written to B. Borkheim that he should not attack Bak. in his letters. B. sees in this a dangerous Muscovite conspiracy. He believes his “masterly invectives” in Wilhelm’s Democratic Weekly make Byzantium – and thus Bakunin too – tremble. In an armoured letter to Becker he has declared with his usual delicacy that he preserves friendship for him and his (by the by, very insignificant) pecuniary assistance, but – politics are henceforth to be excluded from their correspondence! The 12 ragamuffins of the so-called French Branch held another public meeting in London last Tuesday, under Pyat’s chairmanship, with the reading out of one of his melodramatic revolutionary puffs. For this purpose, large wall placards as follows: République Française La Branche française de l’ Association Internationale etc etc. Then Felix Pyat in monster characters. Under the items for discussion stood, in French, among others: 3) Vote d’adhésion au manifeste (the manifesto to be read out by Pyat and fabricated by himself, of the Paris Commune which exists on the moon) et protestation contre l’indifférence en matière politique professée à Bruxelles au dernier Congrès de l’Ass. Internation. But underneath this it said in English (and was also distributed as a handbill): Democrats of all Nations are invited etc. “For the purpose of deciding whether the Workingmen’s Intern. Assoc. is to be a Political Association.” Last Tuesday I was given authorisation, should this be treated or mentioned in the London daily papers as our manifestation, to disavow the fellows forthwith publicly. Fortunately, no notice was taken of them. This evening, however, there is a subcommittee where witnesses are to be examined on the fact that one of this dozen was formerly a marchand d’hommes and a brothel-keeper, another a gambler, a third a spy for the masters in the local tailors’ strike, and so on and so forth. Relying on the “moral paragraph” of the statutes, the gentlemen will probably be thrown out. It naturally annoys them doubly when all politics in relation to such fellows as they are is left out of the game. Salut to Mrs. Burns, Jollymayer and King Cole. Yours, K. M.