ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE*"” 

London, 10 November 1894 
41 Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

Dear Sorge, 

From the above address you will see that I have moved house. After 
Louise’s marriage our old home had become rather too cramped and, since 
the consequences of that marriage soon manifested themselves, we could no 
longer make do. We therefore took a larger house which became available a 
little further down the road, close by the gates into Regent’s Park and, after a 
great bother, moved in four weeks ago—bother with house agents, solicitors, 
contractors, furniture salesmen, etc., and it’s not yet over, my books being 
still in great disarray. Downstairs we have our communal living-rooms, on 
the first floor my study and bedroom, on the second Louise, her husband, the 
baby daughter, born on Tuesday the 6" of this month, and nursery maid, on 
the third floor the two housemaids, lumber-room and visitor’s room. My 
study is at the front, has three windows and is so big that I can accommodate 
nearly all my books (eight cases full) in it and yet, despite its size, very nice 
and easy to heat. In short, we are a lot better off. In the circumstances Louise 
and her baby are very well, and everything went off swimmingly. 

Today, you will get two fat parcels, 3 copies of the (Berlin) 
Sozialdemokrat, 3 of the Pest Volksstimme, the rest of the proceedings of the 
Party Conference in the Vorwarts *'* and a Critica Sociale containing a letter 
by me. ' Because of the removal, we have not been able to send things quite 
so regularly. The Workman’s Times no longer exists, more’s the pity. Tussy’s 
articles in it were the only ones in which the truth about the Continental 
movement was neither withheld from the English workers nor falsified. 

The movement in this country continues to resemble the American one 
except in being a /ittle more advanced than yours, The instinct of the 

*“ F. Engels, ‘International Socialism and Italian Socialism’ 

masses which tells them that Labour must form a party of its own in op- 
position to the two official parties is growing ever stronger and was more 
than ever in evidence at the municipal elections on | November. But old 
traditional memories of various kinds, combined with a lack of people who 
might be capable of translating that instinct into conscious action and 
crystallising it throughout the land, are conducive to the prolongation of this 
preliminary stage—a stage at which thinking is ill-defined and action isolated 
and localised. Anglo-Saxon sectarianism is also rife in the Labour 
movement. The Social Democratic Federation. “* just like your German 
Socialist Labor Party, °°’ has succeeded in turning our theory into the rigid 
dogma of an orthodox sect and is not only narrowly exclusive but, thanks to 
Hyndman, has a thoroughly rotten tradition where international politics is 
concerned, a tradition which, although shaken from time to time, has 
nevertheless remained intact. The Independent Labor Party ''* is excessively 
vague in the matter of tactics, while its leader, Keir Hardie, is an over-canny 
Scot whose demagogic tricks one cannot trust for a moment. Although a poor 
devil of a Scottish miner, he has started a big weekly, The Labour Leader, 
something that could not have been effected without a great deal of money, 
and this money he obtains from a Tory or at any rate Liberal-Unionist, *”° i.e. 
anti-Gladstonian and anti-Home Rule quarter '’'—of that there can be no 
doubt, as is confirmed not only by first-hand information and his own 
political attitude, but also by the literary connections he is known to possess 
in London. Consequently he might—through the defection of the Irish and 
Radical voters—very easily lose his parliamentary seat in the General 
Election of 1895 **° and this would be fortunate, for at the moment the man is 
the greatest stumbling-block of all. He appears in Parliament only on 
demagogic occasions, so as to draw attention to himself by spouting hot air 
about the UNEMPLOYED to no effect whatever, or else to address inanities to 
the Queen’ on the birth of some prince” which, in this country, is cheap and 
trivial to the utmost, etc. Otherwise, and particularly in the provinces, there 
are some very good elements, both in the Social Democratic Federation and 
in the Independent Labor Party —elements which, though scattered, have at 
least succeeded in frustrating every attempt made by the leaders to set the 
two organisations at each other’s throats. John Burns is something of a lone 
wolf politically; he is furiously attacked by both Hyndman and 

* Queen Victoria - ° Edward Albert, Prince of York 

Keir Hardie and acts as though, having despaired of a political Labour 
organisation, he is now pinning his hopes solely on the Trades Unions. True, 
his experience with the former has not been altogether happy and he might 
starve if the Engineers Union did not pay his parliamentary salary. He is 
vain, having let himself be rather excessively soft-sawdered by the Liberals, 
i.e. by the ‘social wing’ of the Radicals, and definitely sets too much store by 
the many individual concessions he has obtained, but is for all that the only 
really honest man in the whole movement, i.e. among its leaders, and has a 
thoroughly proletarian instinct by which he will, or so I believe, be guided 
more surely at the crucial moment than will the others by their cunning and 
calculated self-interest. 

On the Continent success has kindled an appetite for more success, and 
peasant-catching in the literal sense of the term* is coming to be all the rage. 
First the French declare at Nantes, through Lafargue, *'” not only that it is no 
business of ours (I had already written and told them as much’) to precipitate 
the ruin of the small peasant by direct intervention, a task that may safely be 
entrusted to capitalism, but also that it behoves us actually to protect the 
small peasant against taxation, usury and the big landowner. But we cannot 
go along with this, firstly because it is stupid and secondly because it is 
impossible. Next, Vollmar *! goes to Frankfurt and actually proposes to 
bribe your peasant as such; nor is the peasant with whom he is concerned in 
Upper Bavaria, your small, debt-ridden Rhenish chap, but your middling if 
not big peasant who exploits his farmhands, male and female, and sells cattle 
and grain in quantity. And that would not be feasible unless one were to 
abandon the whole principle of the thing. We can only win over the Alpine 
peasants and the big peasants of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein at 
the cost of betraying their ploughboys and day labourers, and in so doing we 
should lose politically more than we should gain. The Frankfurt Party 
Conference failed to come to any decision on this question and that is a good 
thing, in as much as the matter will now be properly gone into; the people 
who attended it knew far too little about peasants, or rural conditions, which 
vary so greatly from province to province, to do anything more than form 
resolutions out of thin air. But the matter will have to be settled sooner or 
later. 

* Tn German peasant-catching {Bauernfdngerei) also means confidence trick. - ° See this volume, 
p. 348 

Here a question occurs to me about the Paris Socialiste; is it still alive or 
is it dead? No one seems to know, When Tussy was in Paris this summer it 
was not yet defunct, but anyone who wanted a copy had to go to the office 
and get one!! I haven’t set eyes on it since February or March. Dereure has 
gone off his head. He was manager and, having got things into a mess, did 
nothing whatever about it. Typically French. 

Following the electoral victories in Belgium, “~~ the Belgians and French 
are making arrangements for the socialist parliamentarians in the various 
countries to keep in regular touch with each other and hold periodic 
conferences. Whether anything will come of this is questionable. At the 
moment the fifty French parliamentarians (among them some twenty-six 
Radical “° converts of a somewhat dubious kind) are very pleased with 
themselves, but there are snags. Amongst the twenty-four old Socialists a 
fierce but silent struggle is going on between the Marxists on the one hand 
and the Blanquists *’ and Allemanists ~' (Possibilists °°”) on the other; whether 
it will result in an open breach is hard to say. 

Besides other socialist papers, I am now also sent the Romanian one 
(Munca) and the Bulgarian (formerly Rabotnik (Working Man), now 
(Socialist), and am gradually familiarising myself with those languages, The 
Romanians are going to bring out a daily in Bucharest.” 

More than any other world event, the death of the Russian Tsar is likely to 
bring about a change, either as a result of an internal movement or as a result 
of a financial crisis and the impossibility of obtaining money abroad. I 
cannot suppose that the existing system will continue to subsist if it brings to 
the throne an idiot whose health, both physical and mental, has been 
shattered by onanism. (This fact is notorious in all the faculties of medicine. 
Krause, a professor at Dorpat,? who attended Nicholas, informed Tsar 
Alexander at the latter’s request that this—onanism—was the immediate 
cause of the illness, was boxed over the ears for his pains, resigned, returned 
the Order of Vladimir sent him after his departure, and went back to 
Germany where he related the story.) If the fun begins in Russia, however, 
young William, too, will become aware that something novel is afoot. For 
then a liberal wind will blow through Europe—a wind which now can only 
be of benefit to us. 

The war in China *”” has given the coup de grace to the old China. 
Isolation has become impossible, for the introduction of railroads, steam 

412 

F b 
* Lumea noua. - ’ Modern name: Tartu 

engines, electricity and large-scale industry is essential if only for reasons of 
military defence. But this means the collapse of the old economic system of 
small farms, a system in which the family also manufactured its industrial 
products, and with it that of the whole of the old social system which 
admitted of a relatively dense population. Millions will be evicted and 
compelled to emigrate and those millions will find their way as far, even, as 
Europe, whither they will come in droves. But in your country as in ours, 
Chinese competition will, as soon as it attains massive proportions, quickly 
bring things to a head and thus the conquest of China by capitalism will at the 
same time provide the impulse for the overthrow of capitalism in Europe and 
America. 

I hope you and your wife are feeling better than when you wrote last. 
Though I am not feeling at all bad myself, one does notice after a while how 
wide is the gap between 73 and 37. 

Cordial regards to yourself and your wife, 

Yours, 
F.E.