[London,] 21 November 1865 

My dear Miller,? 

Since the conference ** held at this place I fell again very sick. 
Afterwards I had to leave London for family affairs.4° Hence my 
protracted silence. As to your report, I could not lay it before the 
conference, because I was too personally introduced in it.*' As to 
your Berlin speech, there were some very disagreeable blunders in 
it which could only emanate from yourself, because they alluded 
to facts only known to you, but half forgotten and wrongly 
reproduced by you.‘ But this is a thing of the past. 

I have received the Berlin letter, and I shall answer to it.2°! I 
have at present neither the time nor the means to go to Berlin. 
Even if I could, you know very well that all and every sort of 
agitation would be out of the question. The Prussian government 
has not in vain declared that the amnesty, as far as I was 
concerned, still excluded me from Prussia, and only gave me leave 
to travel as a Foreigner through the Bismarckian world.'* 

The Workman’s Advocate 1 shall send you one of these days some 
numbers of. You can write to it on every subject you please, social 
or political. Till now it is a paper of good will, but very mediocre 
still. Of course, myself had and have not yet the time to contribute 
to it, although I am one of its Directors.?*° (By my continual 
relapse into damned ill health I was forced to interrupt the 
finishing of my book* and must now apply to it all my time, part 
of which is, with all that, absorbed by the International Associa- 
tion.) Engels has promised to contribute* but not yet done so. And 
the same is the case with other people. 

The Conference has resolved that a Public Congress is to take 
place at the end of May, at Geneva. A programme of questions to 
be there debated, has been resolved upon.’ But nobody can assist 
who does not belong to a society connected with us, and being sent 
as a delegate of such society. I now call upon you very seriously (I 

a The letter bears the stamp: International Working Men’s Association / Central 
Council / London - > Liebknecht’s conspiratorial pseudonym - ¢ See this volume, 
p. 176. - 4 Capital - ¢ See this volume, pp. 198-99, 205. - £ See previous letter. 

shall do the same at Mayence through Stumpf, and shall write to 
the Berliners? on it) to enter the Association with some men, few 
or many, we do not care. I shall send you cards which I have 
prepaid, so that you can give them away. But now work! Every 
society (whatever its number) can enbody itself by paying 5 shilling 
in the block. The cards, on the contrary, which cost each | shilling, 
give the right of individual membership, which is important for all 
workingmen going to Foreign countries. But treat this money 
matter as quite secondary. The principal thing is to get up 
members, individual or societies, in Germany. On the congress, 
Solingen was the.only place represented (they had given power of 
delegation to our old friend Becker,” whom you are very mistaken 
in if you consider him as a tool of Megara Hatzfeldt). 

The programme (of questions to be lead before Congress) I 
shall send you in my next letter. All the Paris liberal and 
republican papers have made great fuss about our Association. 
Henri Martin, the well known historian, had a most enthusiastic 
leader about it in the Siécle! I have heard nothing of 
Quenstedt. 

A thing which will rather surprise you, is this: Shortly before the 
arrival of workingmen’s letter from Berlin, I received from that 
very same place—‘centre et foyer des lumiéres’ of course—a letter 
on the part of— Lothar Bucher, inviting me to become the London 
money article writer of the Preussische Staatsanzeiger, and giving me 
to understand that everybody, der noch bei Lebzeiten im Staat 
wirken will, ‘sich an die Regierung ralliiren’ muss. 4 I have 
answered him by a few lines which he is not likely to exhibit.2° Of 
course, you must not publish in the papers this affair, but you can 
communicate it, under the seal of discretion, to your friends. 

Freiligrath’s London shop—viz. the London branch of the Bank 
of Switzerland — will be shut up, never to be opened again, before 
1866.° 

Give my best compliments to Madame and Alice.‘ 

Yours truly 
A. Williams 

a August Vogt, Sigfrid Meyer, Theodor Metzner - > Johann Philipp Becker 
- © centre and hearth of enlightenment - 4 who wishes to be active in the state during 
his lifetime must ‘rally to the government’ - € See this volume, p. 208. - £ Ernestine 
and Alice Liebknecht -8 Marx’s conspiratorial pseudonym