London, 21 May 1895

41 Regent’s Park Road, N. W.

Dear Baron,

I should have replied at once to your letter of the 6™ had not a nasty
inflammation of the glands in my neck, accompanied by much pain and
inevitable loss of sleep, rendered me almost wholly incapable of work during
the past two weeks. But now you are to be kept waiting no longer.

At the time in question you took it upon yourselves to produce a

“See this volume, p. 514

History of Socialism. **' Of all the people then living there was only one, I
think I may say, whose collaboration was absolutely necessary, and that
person was myself. I might even say that, without my help, a work of this
nature cannot today be anything but incomplete and inadequate. And this you
knew as well as I did. But of all those who might have been of use to you, I
and I alone was the only one who was not invited to collaborate. So you must
have had very pertinent reasons for choosing to exclude me. I am not
complaining—far from it. You had a perfect right to act as you did. I merely
remark on the fact.

What did pique me, however, if only for a moment, was the strange secretiveness with which you withheld from me a matter about which all the
rest of the world was talking. It was only from third persons that I learned of
the whole enterprise, and it was only from the printed prospectus that I
learned of the general outline of the scheme, Not a word either from you or
from Ede; it was as though you had a guilty conscience. At the same time all
manner of people kept surreptitiously inquiring what connection I had with
the thing, whether I had refused to collaborate, etc. And then at length, when
silence could no longer be maintained, the good Ede got round to mentioning
the subject with a sheepishness and embarrassment that would have been
worthy of a worse cause—though nothing wrong had been done save for this
absurd play-acting which, in the meantime, as Louise can testify, has
enlivened many a dull hour for me.

Well and good. You have presented me with a fait accompli; a History of
Socialism on which I have not collaborated. I have accepted the fact without
complaint from the very start. But that fact is of your own making, nor can
you do away with or ignore it, should this ever happen to suit your purpose.
And neither can I do away with it. If, on mature reflection, you chose to slam
the front door in my face at a time when my advice and help might have been
of material use to you, please do not expect of me that I should now slink in
through some little back door in order to help you out of a quandary. I must
admit that, had the roles been reversed, I should have reflected for a very,
very long time before coming to you with a request such as this one. °”’ Is it
really so terribly difficult to see that everyone must bear the consequences of
his own actions? 4s YOU MADE YOUR BED so YOU MUST LIE IN IT. If there is
no room for me here, it is only because you wanted it so.

Well, that settles that. And now you would oblige me by considering this
reply as irrevocable. Let us both regard the whole incident as finished

and done with. °’' Nor shall I mention it to Ede again unless he is the first to
broach it.

Meanwhile I am engaged in producing another piece for the Neue Zeit
which should gladden your heart—Ergdnzungen und Nachtdge zum
‘Kapital’, Buch I I, No. 1: Law of Value and Rate of Profit. Reply to the
Objections of Sombart and C. Schmidt. No. 2—the role of the Stock
Exchange which has changed very considerably since Marx wrote about it in
1865—will follow later. *** A sequel will follow if required and should time
permit. The first article would have been finished had I had nothing else on
my mind.

Of your book," I can say that it improves the further into it one gets. To
judge by the original plan, your treatment of Plato and early Christianity still
leaves something to be desired. You do very much better on the medieval
sects, after which you go from strength to strength; and are at your beat on
the Taborites, °°’ Münzer and then the Anabaptists. °°? Alongside a great
many more important economic analyses of political events there are also
some commonplaces which would seem to indicate a gap in your studies. I
have learnt a great deal from your book which is indispensible preliminary
reading for my new edition of The Peasant War. ~” It would seem to me to
have two main faults—1. Very inadequate research into the development and
role of the déclassé, almost pariah-like elements who had no place whatever
in the feudal system and who were the inevitable outcome of urban
development,, It is they who in all cases formed the lowest stratum of urban
population in the Middle Ages—devoid of rights and set apart from village
communities, craft guilds and feudal dependence. Though difficult, this
should serve as your main basis, for by degrees, with the dissolution of the
feudal bonds, these elements became the pre-proletariat which, in 1789, was
responsible for the revolution in the faubourgs’ ° of Paris and absorbed all the
outcasts of feudal and guild society. You talk of proletarians—a term which
is inapt—amongst whom you comprise weavers whose importance you quite
rightly stress—but you can count them among your ‘proletariat’ only after,
and in so far as, déclassé journeymen weavers came into existence outside of
the guilds. There is still much room for improvement here.

2. You have not fully grasped the position of Germany—her international
economic position in so far as it is possible to speak of any such

* Kautsky, Von Plato bis zu den Wiedertiiufern — suburbs

thing—in the world market at the end of the fifteenth century. That position
alone explains why the bourgeois-plebeian movement, disguised as religion,
which failed in England, the Netherlands and Bohemia should, in sixteenth
century Germany, have enjoyed a certain success—the success of its
religious trappings—whereas the success of its bourgeois substance was
reserved for the next century and for the countries, Holland and England,
which had meanwhile evinced a new tendency in international trade. It is a
lengthy subject which I hope to deal with in extenso in The Peasant War—
would I had got to that stage!

In an attempt to remain popular your style is now that of the leader writer,
now that of the dominie. This you should be able to avoid. Again, is it for
Janssen’s sake that you still refuse to see the pun in which Ulrich von Hütten
is indulging with his obscuri viri? The joke lies in the fact of its meaning
both—obscure or obscurantist—and that is what Hutten was trying to say. °°

But that is all by the way. You and Ede have both been working on a
completely new subject, and you cannot expect to attain perfection straight
away. You should be glad to have produced a book that is presentable, even
at this stages when it is, as it were, in its initial draft form. Now, however,
you are both honour-bound not to allow the ground you have broken to lie
fallow but to continue with your researches so that, in a few years’ time, you
will be able to bring out a new edition capable of meeting every requirement.

Someone in St Petersburg has sent me a Russian translation of your old
piece on marriage and the family (Kosmos). I don’t know who did it. I
shall send it to you.

Many regards from one household to the other,

Yours,
F. Engels

One more thing. I have suggested to Sorge that, when he has finished his
articles on the American movement, these should be published as an offprint. °”’ He is agreeable but says there will have to be a great deal of revision
and many corrections and additions, for which he is unlikely

to have time until his summer holidays. He accepted my proposal that the
thing be suggested to Dietz. Perhaps you would be so good as to ask Dietz if
he would care to take it on and, if so, on what terms. The articles are the
best, and the only authentic, stuff we have got on the American movement,
and I think it most desirable that they should be preserved for readers as a
consecutive whole in an off-print.