[London, about 14 June 1853] 

... On the other hand, a reply must be given,” and that can best 
be done by third parties. In which case you need feel no 
compunction about entering into personal matters and regaling 
the brutal democratic ‘temperament’ with a few pungent ‘anec- 
dotes’...°°" 

2 to Willich. See this volume, pp. 330-31. 

In dealings with the Reform I would recommend, besides 
shrewdness, une modération extréme.’ This clever-clever philistine ‘ 
who, in Hesse—and Hesse was his world—represented nothing 
except the demiurge of this, his world: the petty bourgeois, and 
who now assumes the air of one who, from the very start, has 
represented the proletariat on a ‘materialist basis’—this smiling 
nonentity who, with Solomon-like dicta, ‘stresses’ his shrewdness 
and remarkable composure vis-a-vis rebellious parties—this incar- 
nation of a marginal gloss to ‘Heise’s articles’; this fellow, then, 
does not, of course, interest me—he repels me. But you people 
helped to make the paper. It appears in New York. 

Half Germany will come to New York for the Exhibition.’ You 
have no other paper in New York. Might it not, then, be impolitic 
to throw over Kellner and the paper? It would in the end be 
doing the fellows another favour. Pretend to be naive. Go on 
writing; you couldn’t do him a worse turn. Do not emancipate him 
from influences which, as everything goes to show, have been 
damnably irksome to him. Do as the Prussian bourgeois do. The 
government and its Manteuffel twist and turn in vain to rid 
themselves of the friendship of those bourgeois. The latter, for 
their part, pretend to believe in the constitutionality of their 
government, and le gouvernement est constitutionnel malgré lui-meme': 
that’s worldly wisdom for you. 

The Neu-England-Zeitung is equally unreliable and likely to 
remain so. Mr Schlager, a pedant replete with platitudes, a 
presumptious bore who always knows better (a la Kellner, ‘le mieux 
est le plus grand ennemi du bien'*), has written to Pieper suggesting I 
write for the N.-E.-Z. about the necessary transition from the 
bourgeois to the communist mode of production. 

Citizen Marx with his ‘schematising and organising’ intellect 
would, it seems, be well suited to this task set him by Citizen 
Schlager, but Citizen Marx must ‘forego his abstract language’ and 
write in the same manner as all, etc. Worthy Citizen Schlager! In 
the same letter he enjoins Pieper on no account to attack Citizens 
Ruge and Heinzen (he regularly deletes such passages) since the ‘élite 
of his readers’ (just think what the others must be like!) are 
Heinzenites, and the N.-E.-Z. is destined (literally) to inherit the 
readers of the Janus. Mighty Citizen Schlager! Almighty Pompey! 
Nevertheless, I have advised Pieper to go on writing for Schlager. 

4 extreme moderation - > Gottlieb Kellner - © and the government is constitutional 
despite itself - 4 ‘the better is the greatest enemy of the good’ 

Le motif est trés simple.* We are not doing our enemies a favour by 
writing for them. Tout au contraire.” We could hardly play them a 
worse trick...