Manchester, 6 June [1853,] evening 

Dear Marx, 

I had intended to write to you by the first post today, but was 
detained at the office until 8 o’clock. You will have received both 
Weydemeyer’s and Cluss’ anti-Willich statements in the Criminal 
Zeitung,” i.e. direct from America. If not, write to me at once. As 
usual, papa Weydemeyer is too long-winded, very seldom makes a 
point, then promptly blunts it with his style, and unfolds his 
well-known lack of verve with rare composure. Nevertheless, the 
man has done his best, the story about Hentze, the ‘comrade-in- 
arms’, and the influence of others on Hirsch’s pen is nicely 
fashioned; his incredible style and his composure, regarded over 
there as impassibility, will appeal to the philistines, and his 
performance can, on the whole, be regarded as satisfactory. Cluss’ 
statement, on the other hand, pleases me enormously. In every 
line we hear the chuckle of l'homme supérieur’ who, through 
‘personal contact’ with Willich, has, as it were, become physically 

4 Roesgen - > J. Weydemeyer, ‘Weiters in der Willich-Hirsch’schen Angelegenheit’; 
A. Cluss, ‘An die Redaktion der New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung’, Belletristisches Journal 
und New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung, No. 10, 20 May 1853. - © the superior man 

conscious of his superiority. For lightness of style, this surpasses 
everything that Cluss has ever written. Never a clumsy turn of 
phrase, not a trace of géne* or embarrassment. How well it 
becomes him thus to ape the worthy citizen of benevolent mien 
who nevertheless betrays the cloven hoof at every turn. How 
splendid, the sentence about ‘revolutionary agencies’ being ‘a 
swindle’ off which, according to Willich, he lives. The chivalrous 
one will have been surprised to find among the uncouth ‘agents’ *” 
a fellow who is so dashing, so adroit, so aggressive by nature and 
yet so unassumingly noble in his bearing, and who returns thrust 
for thrust a tempo” so subtly—far more subtly and deftly than 
himself. If only Willich had the discernment to discover this! But 
irritation and due reflection will, I trust, give him a little more 
insight. 

It is obvious that we shall have to see this dirty business through 
to the bitter end. The more resolutely we tackle it the better. 
You'll find, by the way, that it won’t be so bad after all. The 
chivalrous one has promised vastly more than he can fulfil. We 
shall hear of assassination attempts, etc., the Schramm affair will 
be glamorously tricked out,° and such chimeras: will be evoked as 
will cause us to stare at one another in amazement, not having the 
faintest idea what the man is actually talking about; at worst he 
will tell the story about Marx and Engels arriving drunk one 
evening at Great Windmill Street** (vide Kinkel in Cincinnati, 
coram Huzelio*). If he goes as far as that, I shall tell the 
scandal-loving American public what the Besancon Company“ 
used to talk about when Willich and the ROS pastor Corydon 
Rau! were not present. Au bout du comptes what can a brute of this 
kind find to tax us with? Mark my word, it will be just as pauvre” as 
bie smear.’ 

I shall be seeing Borchardt within the next few days, If any 
recommendations are to be had, you can trust me to get them! 
But I hardly imagine that Steinthal, etc., have connections of the 
sort in London. It’s almost .wholly outside their line of business. 
Besides, if only for fear of making a fool] of himself, the fellow will 
attempt to put off doing anything about it up here. If it were not 
for Lupus, I'd consign the chap, etc. I can’t abide him, with his 

2 constraint - > in good time - © See this volume, pp. 325-26. - 4 in Huzel’s 
presence (ibid., pp. 148-50) - © comely - £ Officer Rau is compared to shepherd 
Corydon, a enateeler in pastoral poems who suffers from unrequited love. - 
8 Come to that - » poor -' An allusion to [Müller-]Tellering’s Vorgeschmack in die 
künftige deutsche Diktatur von Marx und Engels. -j) See this volume, p. 334. 

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Third page of Engels’ letter to Marx of 6 June 1853 

smooth, self-important, vainglorious, deceitful charlatan’s physiog- 
nomy. 

If Lassalle has given you a good, neutral address in Düsseldorf, 
you can send me 100 copies.* We shall arrange for them to be 
packed in bales of twist by firms up here; but they should not be 
addressed to Lassalle himself, since the packages will go to 
Gladbach, Elberfeld and so on, where they will have to be stamped 
and sent by post to Dusseldorf. However, we cannot entrust a 
package for Lassalle or the Hatzfeldt woman to any local firm, 
because, 1. they all employ at least one Rhinelander who knows all 
the gossip, or 2. if that goes off all right, the recipients of the bales 
will get to know about it, or 3. at the very best the postal 
authorities will take a look at the things before delivering them. 
We have a good address in Cologne, but are not, alas, very well 
acquainted with the people who are the principal buyers here for 
the firm in Cologne, and hence cannot expect them to do any 
smuggling. Indeed, what we shall tell the people here is that the 
packages contain presents for the fair sex. 

From all this you will gather that I am once again on passable 
terms with Charles.” The affair was settled with great dispatch at 
the first suitable opportunity. Nevertheless you will realise that the 
fool derives a certain pleasure from having been given preference 
over myself in one rotten respect at least, because of Mr Gottfried 
Ermen’s envy of my old man. Habeat sibi.© He at any rate realises 
that if I so choose, I can become maitre de la situation’ within 48 
hours, and that’s sufficient. 

The absence of landed property is indeed the key to the whole 
of the East.**’ Therein lies its political and religious history. But 
how to explain the fact that orientals never reached the stage of 
landed property, not even the feudal kind? This is, I think, largely 
due to the climate, combined with the nature of the land, more 
especially the great stretches of desert extending from the Sahara 
right across Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary*” to the highest of 
the Asiatic uplands. Here artificial irrigation is the first prerequi- 
site for agriculture, and this is the responsibility either of the 
communes, the provinces or the central government. In the East, 
the government has always consisted of 3 departments only: 
Finance (pillage at home), War (pillage at home and abroad), and 
travaux publics, provision for reproduction. The British govern- 

a K. Marx, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne (see this volume, 
p- 334). - > Roesgen - © Let him have it.-4 master of the situation - © public 
works 

ment in India has put a somewhat narrower interpretation on 
nos. 1 and 2 while completely neglecting no. 3, so that Indian 
agriculture is going to wrack and ruin. Free competition is proving 
an absolute fiasco there. The fact that the land was made fertile by 
artificial means and immediately ceased to be so when the conduits 
fell into disrepair, explains the otherwise curious circumstance that 
vast expanses are now arid wastes which once were magnificently 
cultivated (Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in the Yemen, any number of 
localities in Egypt, Persia, Hindustan); it explains the fact that one 
single war of devastation could depopulate and entirely strip a 
country of its civilisation for centuries to come. This, I believe, also 
accounts for the destruction of southern Arabian trade before 
Mohammed’s time, a circumstance very rightly regarded by you as 
one of the mainsprings of the Mohammedan revolution.* I am not 
sufficiently well acquainted with the history of trade during the 
first six centuries A.D. to be able to judge to what extent general 
material conditions in the world made the trade route via Persia to 
the Black Sea and to Syria and Asia Minor via the Persian Gulf 
preferable to the Red Sea route. But one significant factor, at any 
rate, must have been the relative safety of the caravans in the 
well-ordered Persian Empire under the Sassanids, whereas be- 
tween 200 and 600 A.D. the Yemen was almost continuously being 
subjugated, overrun and pillaged by the Abyssinians. By the 
seventh century the cities of southern Arabia, still flourishing in 
Roman times, had become a veritable wilderness of ruins; in the 
course of 500 years what were purely mythical, legendary traditions 
regarding their origin had been appropriated by the neighbouring 
Beduins, (cf. the Koran and the Arab historian Novairi), and the 
alphabet in which the local inscriptions had been written was 
almost wholly unknown although there was no other, so that de facto 
writing had fallen into oblivion. Things of this kind presuppose, 
not only a superseding, probably due to general trading conditions, 
but outright violent destruction such as could only be explained by 
the Ethiopian invasion. The expulsion of the Abyssinians did not 
take place until about 40 years before Mohammed, and was plainly 
the first act of the Arabs’ awakening national consciousness, which 
was further aroused by Persian invasions from the North 
penetrating almost as far as Mecca. I shall not be tackling the 
history of Mohammed himself for a few days yet; so far it seems 
to me to have the character of a Beduin reaction against the 
settled, albeit decadent urban fellaheen whose religion by then was 

a See this volume, p. 332. 

also much debased, combining as it did a degenerate form of 
nature worship with a degenerate form of Judaism and Christ- 
ianity. 

Old Bernier’s stuff* is really very fine. It’s a real pleasure to get 
back to something written by a sensible, lucid old Frenchman who 
constantly hits the nail on the head sans avoir lair de s’en 
apercevoir” 

Since I am in any case tied up with the eastern mummery for 
some weeks, I have made use of the opportunity to learn Persian. 
I am put off Arabic, partly by my inborn hatred of Semitic 
languages, partly by the impossibility of getting anywhere, without 
considerable expenditure of time, in so extensive a language—one 
which has 4,000 roots and goes back over 2,000-3,000 years. By 
comparison, Persian is absolute child’s play. Were it not for that 
damned Arabic alphabet in which every half dozen letters looks 
like every other half dozen and the vowels are not written, I would 
undertake to learn the entire grammar within 48 hours. This for 
the better encouragement of Pieper should he feel the urge to 
imitate me in this poor joke. I have set myself a maximum of 
three weeks for Persian, so if he stakes two months on it he'll best 
me anyway. What a pity Weitling can’t speak Persian; he would 
then have his langue universelle toute trouvée’ since it is, to my 
knowledge, the only language where ‘me’ and ‘to me’ are never at 
odds, the dative and accusative always being the same.” 

It is, by the way, rather pleasing to read dissolute old Hafiz in 
the original language, which sounds quite passable and, in his 
grammar,‘ old Sir William Jones likes to cite as examples dubious 
Persian jokes, subsequently translated into Greek verse in his 
Commentariis poeseos asiaticae, because even in Latin they seem to 
him too obscene. These commentaries, Jones’ Works, Vol. II, De 
poesi erotica, will amuse you. Persian prose, on the other hand, i 
deadly dull. E.g. the Rauzat-us-safa by the noble Mirkhond, who 
recounts the Persian epic in very flowery but vacuous language. Of 
Alexander the Great, he says that the name Iskander, in the 
fonian language, is Akshid Rus (like Iskander, a corrupt version of 
Alexandros); it means much the same as filusuf, which derives 
from fila, love, and sufa, wisdom, ‘Iskander’ thus being synonym- 
ous with ‘friend of wisdom’. 

a F. Bernier, Voyages contenant la description des états du Grand Mogol, de l’Indoustan, 
du Royaume de Cachemire, etc. See also this volume, pp. 332-34. - > without 
appearing to be aware of it - © universal language ready-made - 4 W. Jones, A 
Grammar of the Persian Language. 

Of a rerep king he says: ‘He beat the drum of abdication with 
the drumsticks of retirement’, as will pére Willich, should he 
involve himself any more deeply in the literary fray. Willich will 
also suffer the same fate as King Afrasiab of Turan when deserted 
by his troops and of whom Mirkhond says: ‘He gnawed the nails 
of horror with the teeth of desperation until the blood of 
vanquished consciousness welled forth from the finger-tips of 
shame.’ 

More tomorrow.