London, 30 September 1891 

Dear Sorge, 

I spent a fortnight in Scotland and Ireland with Pumps and Louise 
Kautsky ?°* after which I attended to the proofs of the new edition* 
of the Origin of the Family; now I am dealing with arrears of corres- 
pondence, and shall then finish off Volume III.° 

Meanwhile I enclose a business communication for Mother Wisch- 
newetzky which you will, I trust, be able to pass on to her. Except 
by way of business I don’t, of course, want to have anything to do 
with her. 

I am sorry to see from your letter of the 15th that you are plagued 
with the gout. That being so, it’s certainly a good thing that you 
should be eating less nitrogenous food and taking more physical exer- 
cise. 

The Brussels Congress '?> did in fact go off better than you sup- 
pose. The only one of the Germans to behave boorishly was Lieb- 
knecht, but he had been most grossly provoked by Nieuwenhuis in 
the rudest, clerico-jesuitical way. Louise, who represented the work- 
ing women of Vienna, says that Nieuwenhuis’ base attacks and insi- 
nuations were utterly outrageous. 

The Trapes Union Congress was also a_ success.? The ‘old’ 
unions did everything in their power to get the Liverpudlian?’ eight 
hours resolution overturned and their failure to do more than whittle 
away a small fragment of it is of itself a defeat for them and their mid- 
dle-class allies. You ought to have seen the liberal papers, in particu- 
lar the Scottish ones, and the way they wrung their hands over the aber- 
rations of the English working man and his lapse into socialism. 

The People is quite impossible. It’s ages since I have seen such 
a silly hotchpotch of a paper. Who has translated my Entwick- 
lung? 3!) Jonas? 

* the fourth German edition-> of Capital-< F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientif- 
we. 

I'll send the necessary to the Soczaliste and report back to you la- 
ter. 

Lafargue has been put up as candidate in Lille and is thus entitled 
to spend the 5 weeks of the période électorale out of prison and to en- 
gage in propaganda. He is unlikely to get in but, come the general 
election, he is sure of being returned in the Département du Nord.*!? 

Abetted by Hyndman, Gilles continues his attempts to besmear 
Aveling —not a bad thing on the whole, firstly because he’s such 
a colossal blackguard and secondly because we shall succeed increas- 
ingly in getting Hyndman out into the open.* More news of all sorts 
by the next post. 

Warm regards to your wife” and yourself. 

Your 
F. E.