London, 4 February 1886 

Dear Comrade, 

I am reading your work Hoe ons land geregeerd wordt with great 
pleasure, firstly because I am relearning a great deal of conversa- 
tional Dutch therefrom and secondly because I am learning so much 
about the internal administration of Holland. Along with England 
and Switzerland, Holland is the only West European country not to 
have had absolute monarchy in the period between the 16th and 18th 
centuries, and in consequence enjoys a number of advantages, nota- 
bly a residue of local and provincial self-government and an absence 
of any real bureaucracy in the French or Prussian sense. This is 
a great advantage both as regards the development of a national char- 
acter and as regards the future; for only a few changes will have to be 

* world market 

made to establish here that free self-government by the working 
[people] * which will necessarily be our best tool in the reorganisation 
of the mode of production. All this is lacking in Germany and France 
and will have to be built up from scratch. May I congratulate you on 
your success in producing a popular exposition. 

Your translation of my pamphlet? places me most deeply in your 
debt. In this instance it will not be so easy to employ popular lan- 
guage throughout, as in your little opus, but this should present no 
problem to someone with so good a command of both languages as 
yourself. 

‘“Gewanne’ are the strips of land of roughly the same quality into 
which common agricultural and pasture land is first divided; maybe 
ten or twenty in all. Then each commoner with full rights is given an 
equal share of each strip. Thus, if there are ten strips and a hundred 
commoners, there will be 1,000 parcels of land all told, each com- 
moner getting 10 parcels, one in each strip. Subsequently commoners 
may often swap parcels so that though they may have fewer indivi- 
dual plots, their holdings are more compact. The same thing was still 
happening until quite lately in Ireland in the ‘runpate’ >9? villages, 
and in the Highlands of Scotland (cf: Fortnightly Review, November 
1885, an article on village communities in Scotland‘). 

G.L. Maurer has written: 

1) Einleitung in die Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf- und Städteverfas- 
sung in Deutschland. 

2) Geschichte der Markenverfassung in Deutschland. 

3) Geschichte der Hofverfassung » 4 vols. 
4) ditto °  Städteverfassung " ”2” 
5) ditto ”  Dorfoerfassung " ”" 2” 

Nos. | and 2 are the most important, but the others are not without 
importance either, particularly as regards German history. Repeti- 
tiveness, poor style and lack of method make these otherwise excel- 
lent books difficult to study. On n’est pas Allemand pour rien! * 

The best works on the great French Revolution are indubitably 
those of Georges Avenel who died round about 1875. Lundis révolu- 
tionnaires, a collection of feuilletons which came out in the République 

“The manuscript is damaged here.- F.Engels, De ontwikkeling van het socialisme 
van utopie tot wetenschap.- ° J.Rae, ‘The Scotch Village Community’, The Fort- 
nightly Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. CCXXVII, 1 November 1885.- 4 One’s not a 
German for nothing. 

Frangaise; also, Anacharsis Cloots, this last a survey, forming part of the 
biography, of the course of the Revolution up till Thermidor 1794. 
It’s melodramatically written and, if one is not to lose the thread, one 
has continually to refer to Mignet? or Thiers for the exact dates. But 
Avenel has made a close study of the archives and also produces 
a vast amount of new and reliable material. He is indisputably the 
best source for the period from September 1792 to July 1794. Then 
there is a very good book by Bougeart‘* on Jean Paul Marat, L’Ami 
du peuple; also another about Marat, said to be good, the name of 
whose author eludes me — it begins with Ch.* Some other good stuff 
also appeared in the final years of the Empire; the Robespierrites 
(Hamel, S¢.- Just etc.) not, on the whole, so good — mostly mere rhe- 
toric and quotations from speeches. 

Mignet still remains the bourgeois historian of my choice. 

The Kautskys, Avelings, and Lenchen send their kindest regards. 
What is the position about your coming over here in the summer? 

With kindest regards from 

Yours, 
F. Engels