London, 20 June 1882 

Dear Sorge, 

I shall attend to your business affairs within the next few days.??! 
I am sending the money for the Egalité to Lafargue, who is in Paris, 
and shall extract a receipt from him, however irregular the form it 
may take. As regards The Labour Standard you’ll lose nothing if I only 
arrange for the subscription to run from 1 July; the paper gets more 
pitiful all the time. 

Marx was in Algiers for approx. 2 months where, as I think I told 
you,* he had a relapse of pteurisy; having been cured of it, he went to 
Monte Carlo in Monaco and had another but milder one. He left 
there for Paris approx. 3 weeks ago and is now staying with his 
daughter, Madame Longuet, in Argenteuil near Paris whence he 
travels daily to Enghien to avail himself of the local sulphur springs 
for his chronic bronchial catarrh and cough. His general state of 
health is very good; as to his further movements, that depends entirely 
upon the doctors. 

The English translation of the Manifesto we have been sent is 
quite unpublishable without total revision. But you will realise that 
anything of the kind is inconceivable under present circum- 
stances. 

I have not seen or heard anything of Leo” for months. He’s a pecu- 
liar cove who must be allowed to go his own way. I have not even got 
his address. Apropos, for some time I have been receiving communi- 
cations for Leo from Dr Lilienthal in New York, which I can only 
deal with via Paris. Who is this Lilienthal? 

The Lassalleans’ thrustfulness after their arrival in America was in- 
evitable. People who carried the one true gospel in their pack could 
hardly have behaved with less pretentiousness towards those Ameri- 
cans still languishing in spiritual darkness. Moreover it was for them 
to find new ground in America to replace that which was being in- 

@ See this volume, p. 237.-° Lev Hartmann 

creasingly cut from under their feet in Germany. By way of return we 
are happily rid of them in Germany; in America, where everything 
proceeds ten times as quickly, they’ll soon be bested. 

I trust your eyes will improve through being spared. I too 
had something of the sort once and know what a vile business 
it is. 

In Germany things are going splendidly on the whole. It is true 
that the literary gentlemen in the party have tried to bring about 
a change of front, at once reactionary, bourgeois, tame and cultured, 
but it has proved a resounding failure. The infamies to which socialist 
workers everywhere have been subjected have everywhere made 
them much more revolutionary than they were even 3 years ago. You 
will have seen the details in the Sozialdemokrat. Of the leaders, Bebel 
is the man who behaved best over the affair. Liebknecht shilly- 
shallied somewhat, for not only did he himself welcome every ‘eddi- 
cated’ semi-social democrat with open arms while failing to run a 
careful eye over him, but his son-in-law, that obese sluggard Bruno 
Geiser, is one of the biggest wailers.?*? Because it makes short 
work of their literary earnings, these people would like to get rid of 
the Anti-Socialist Law' at any cost and to do so ignominiously 
by means of moderation and meekness, tameness and toadyism. As 
soon as the law is repealed (not even the bourgeois believe that it 
will be renewed either by the present or some other eventual 
Reichstag, since it has proved totally ineffective), the split will prob- 
ably be brought out into the open, whereupon your Vierecks, 
Hochbergs, Geisers, Bloses & Co. will form a separate right wing, 
in which case we shall be able to negotiate with them as occasion 
arises, until they eventually come to grief for good and all. We 
said as much* immediately after the promulgation of the Anti- 
Socialist Law when Hochberg and Schramm published in the 
Jahrbuch **> what was, under the circumstances, a quite infamous 
assessment of the party’s activities up till that date, and demanded 
that the party conduct itself in a more ‘eddicated’, decorous and 
presentable manner.” 

@ K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘Circular Letter to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, 
Wilhelm Bracke and Others’.-' [K. Héchberg, E. Bernstein and C. A. Schramm, ] 
‘Riickblicke auf die sozialistische Bewegung in Deutschland. Kritische Aphorismen 
von*,*’, Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 1. Jg., 1. Halfte, Zurich- 
Oberstrass, 1879. 

My regards to Adolph, have had no sign of life from him. 
Kindest regards. 

Your 
F. Engels 

Tell Adolph that Pumps has had a little girl.