ENGELS TO NIKOLAI DANIELSON*” 

IN ST. PETERSBURG 

London, 9 January 1895 
41 Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

My dear Sir, 

I have duly received yours of the 1 December. What Mr. von Struve 
means by saying that Marx, completes but not disproves Malthus’ theory of 
population I do not understand.* I think the note on Malthus in Vol. I, Note 
75, to Chapter XXII I, I? ought to have been explicit enough for anybody. 
Moreover, I do not see, how anybody can speak of completing Malthus’ 
theory today, when that theory rests upon the assumption, that population 
presses on the means of subsistence, while corn in London is at 20/- the 
quarter, or less than half the average price from 1848 to 1870, and when it is 
universally acknowledged that the means of subsistence now press upon the 
population which is not large enough to consume them! As to Russia, if the 
peasant is compelled to sell the corn which he ought to eat, surely it is not 
pressure of [excess] population which compels him to do so, but pressure 
from the tax-gatherer, the landlord, the kulak* etc. etc. As far as I know, the 
low price of Argentinian wheat has more to do with agrarian distress all ever 
Europe, Russia included, than anything else. 

We have just learned that a savant of your city has been informed that he 
can have Vol. II P passed free to him on applying specially for it at the office 
of the Censorship. I think it as well to communicate this fact to you because 
it may lead you to give me instructions how to forward to you the remaining 
sheets which I hold at your disposal, 

Yours very truly 
Ee 

Please note change of house number. 

*P. von Struve, Critical Notes on the Development of Capitalism in Russia, St. Petersburg, [in 
Russian], 1894(footnote ‘to p. 183). - » See present edition, Vol. 35, Chapter XXV, Section 1, 
pp. 611-13 ° of Capital- Engels’ pen-name consisting of Louise Kautsky’s initials — * word in 
Russian