{[London,] 25 September 1857 

Dear Engels, 

I presume you will have received today my letter of the day 
before yesterday acknowledging the £5. I cannot understand the 
delay, having myself taken it to the post on time. 

Your ‘Army’ is capital; except that I was thunderstruck by the 
sheer bulk of it—so much work can’t possibly be good for you. 
And if I’d known that you would work late into the night I would 
rather have let the whole thing go to the devil. 

More graphically than anything else the history of the army 
demonstrates the rightness of our views as to the connection 
between the productive forces and social relations. Altogether, the 
ARMY is of importance in economic development. E.g. it was in the 
army of Antiquity that the salaire* was first fully developed. 
Likewise the peculium castrense in Rome, the first legal form 
according recognition to the movable property of others than 
fathers of families. Likewise the guild system in the corporation of 
the fabri.’’ Here too the first use of machinery on a large scale. 
Even the special value of metals and their use as money would 
seem to have been based originally—-as soon as Grimm’s Stone 
Age was over—on their significance in war. Again, the division of 
labour within a branch was first put into practice by armies. All 
this, moreover, a very striking epitome of the whole history of civil 
societies. If you ever have the time, you might work the thing out 
from that point of view. 

The only points I think you have overlooked in your account 
are: 1, the earliest manifestation of a ready-made mercenary 
system on a large scale and at once among the Carthaginians (for 
our Own PRIVATE USE I shall take a look at a work—previously 
unknown to me—by a Berlin man on the Carthaginian armies”); 
2. the development of the army system in the 15th and early 16th 
centuries in Italy, where tactical ruses, at any rate, were perfected. 
Likewise an extremely humorous description of Machiavelli’s 

a wages - b Presumably W. Bétticher’s Geschichte der Carthager. 

100. Engels to Marx. 6 October 187 

(which I shall extract for you) in his History of Florence? of how the 
condottieri? fought. (But if I come and meet you in Brighton 
(when?),””’ perhaps I had better bring you the Machiavelli. The 
History of Florence is a masterpiece.) Lastly, 3. the Asiatic military 
system as it first appeared in Persia and subsequently in various 
much modified forms among, inter alia, the Mongols and Turks. 

In writing my biographies, etc., I naturally had to consult all 
sorts of encyclopaedias, including German ones. In so doing I 
discovered that, under the headings ‘Labour’, ‘Classes’, ‘Produc- 
tion’, etc., much had been systematically if stupidly cribbed from us. 
On the other hand, everyone had eschewed all mention of ourselves, 
even when devoting whole columns to Mr Edgar Bauer and other 
such panjandrums. Tant mieux pour nous> The biographies in the 
German encyclopaedias are written for children under 8 years of 
age. The French, if biased, are at least urbane. The English 
encyclopaedias crib systematically from the French and German. In 
the latter, the same fellows appear to unload the same twaddle onto 
different publishers. Ersch and Gruber not much good except in 
the later volumes, wherein many learned articles. 

Salut. 

Your 
K. M. 

Pauly’s Realencyclopddie des Alterthums is reliable.