London, 23 November 1882 

Dear Moor, 

Encl. letter from Lafargue which you might let me have back as 
I only got it this morning. So he will doubtless have to wend his way 
to the cachot within the next few days. What incurable fools they are. 
If Guesde and Lafargue are locked up in Montlugon, the paper < will 
be pretty well done for. The government dare not bring them before 
a court in Paris, but may well take the liberty of quietly neutralising 
one after the other in the provinces. Until the paper had been firmly 
established, they ought not to have provided any pretexts for inter- 
vention; instead of that we have these Bakuninist antics. 

I had asked Lafargue for information about the relative strength of 
the two parties and also about the Maret-Godard affair. You see 

@ Public Prosecutor’s Department -° prison-*° L’Egalité 

what he says. Obviously it was to please the Chambres Syndicales* and 
none other than Malon & Co. sacrificed the programme and the move- 
ment’s entire past since the time of the Marseilles Congress.*** His 
apparent strength is his real weakness. If you debase your programme 
to the level of the most ordinary Trapes UNIONS, you will clearly have no 
difficulty in obtaining a ‘large public’. 

Electricity has enabled me to score a minor triumph. You may per- 
haps remember my discussing the Cartesian-Leibnizian point of dis- 
pute in regard to mv and mv? as measures of motion.*** What it boils 
down to is that mv is the measure of mechanical motion when trans- 

mitted by mechanical motion as such, whereas is the meas- 

ure of motion when it changes its form, i. e. the measure in conformity 
with which it turns into heat, electricity, etc. Now, so long as 
the chaps in the physical laboratories had the sole say in electrical 
matters, the measure of electromotive force, the force regarded as 
representative of electrical energy, was the volt (E), the product 
of the intensity of the current (ampére, C) and resistance (ohm, R). 

E=CxR. 

And that is correct so long as electrical energy does not change on 
transmission into another form of motion. Now, however, in his presi- 
dential address at the last meeting of the British Association,*’? we 
have Siemens proposing an additional unit, the watt (hereafter W) 
which is intended to express the true energy of an electric current 
(i.e. as distinct from other forms of motion, vulgo energy) and whose 
value is volt X ampére, W = E x C. 

ButW=ExC=CxRxC=C?R. 

Resistance in electricity represents the same as mass in mechanical 
motion. Hence it would appear that in electrical as in mechanical 
motion the quantitatively measurable manifestation of this motion — 
on the one hand velocity, on the other intensity of current — 
functions, in the case of simple transmission without change of form, 
as a simple factor of the first power, while in the case of transmission 
wth change of form, as a factor squared. Thus what I have formulated 
for the first time is a universal natural law of motion. Now, 
however, I must really go ahead and finish my dialectics of 
nature. 

* Syndicalist Chambers (more on these trade union organisations see on pp. 388-89) 

All is well at your house, but the beer everywhere is rotten; only the 
German stuff in the West End is any good. 

Your 
F.E.