[Draft] 

London, 23 January 1877 
41 Maitland Park Road, N. W. 

Dear Citizen, 

On receiving your kind letter of 15 December, I wrote to our 
friend Hirsch * about my obligations, stipulated in the contract, to 
Mr Lachatre, the publisher of Capital, which do not admit of my 
agreeing to your project ** without his authorisation. I then wrote 
to the latter’? and from day to day vainly awaited his reply. 
Finally, a few days ago, I sent him a registered letter,!? the first 
having doubtless been intercepted—an everyday occurrence in the 
Prusso-German Empire. Pending Mr Lachatre’s reply, I should 
further point out that, even should he give his consent, Mr 
A. Quést would be quite capable of ordering the confiscation of 
every ‘summary’ of Capital. Since Mr Lachatre had been convicted 
in absentia of ‘communard’ acts and was living abroad as a 
refugee, the judicial administration of Lachatre’s booksellers was 
placed by the Broglie ministry in the hands of Mr Quést who 
belongs to the dregs of the conservative party and who has done 

everything in his power first to hold up the printing of my book 
and then to prevent its distribution. He would be just the man to 
play a trick on you, despite the authorisation from Mr Lachatre 
vis-a-vis whom I am myself bound by a private contract but who, 
vis-a-vis Mr Quést, is entirely powerless, since this sequestrator is 
his legal trustee. 

Under the circumstances I think that the best thing would be to 
put off for the moment ‘a summary’ of Capital, and in the 
meantime bring out a short review of it, if necessary in the form 
of a small pamphlet, which would be all the more useful in that 
Mr Block (in the Journal des Economistes) * and Mr Laveleye (in the 
Revue des deux Mondes)” have given the French public utterly false 
notions of Capital. Such a course had also been agreed at the 
outset by Mr Hirsch and myself. 

Please accept my best thanks for your book which you were kind 
enough to send me and which is distinguished by great stylistic 
verve and a sound basis. 

I trust the incident that has put us in touch with one another 
will be the starting point of a sustained correspondence. 

Yours ever, 

K. M.