London, 24 November 1879 

Dear Bebel, 

I had good reasons for assuming that Auer was alluding to 
myself.* The date proves nothing. He expressly excludes Most. So go 
and ask him yourself whom he meant; then we shall see what he says. 
I’m positive that the misunderstanding was not on my side.*° 

Hochberg did, to be sure, make the statement in question. 

I know that you were mostly away while the negotiations with 
Hirsch were going on and it never occurred to me to hold you 
personally responsible for what happened. 

As regards the question of tariffs, your letter wholly corrobo- 
rates what I have said.‘ If feelings were divided, as was indeed the 
case, and if it was thought desirable to take those divided feelings 
into consideration, what was called for was, of course, abstention, no 
less. Otherwise it would have meant taking one side only into 
consideration. But why the protectionist section was more deserv- 
ing of consideration than the free trade one is difficult to see. You 
say you cannot adopt a purely negative attitude in Parliament. But 
since everyone ultimately voted against the Bill, their attitude was, 
after all, purely negative. All I'm saying is, they ought to have 
known from the start how they intended to conduct themselves; 
they ought to have acted in conformity with the final vote. 

Questions which enable Social-Democratic deputies to abandon a 
purely negative attitude are very narrowly circumscribed. All are 
questions which immediately involve the relation of workers to 
capitalists: factory legislation, the normal working-day, employer’s 
liability, payment in goods, etc. Perhaps also improvements in the 
purely bourgeois sense such as constitute a positive step forward: 
standardisation of coins and weights, freedom of movement, 
extension of personal freedom, etc. You’re unlikely to be troubled 
with these for the time being. In the case of all other economic 
questions, such as protective tariffs, nationalisation of the railways, 
assurance companies, etc., Social-Democratic deputies must always 
uphold the vital principle of consenting to nothing that increases 

b 

4 See this volume, p. 420. - > Ibid., p. 417. - © Ibid., pp. 417-18. 

the power of the government vis-a-vis the people. And this is 
made all the easier in that feelings within the party itself will, of 
course, invariably be divided in such cases and hence abstention, a 
negative attitude, is automatically called for. 

What you say about Kayser makes the matter even worse. If he 
speaks in favour of protective tariffs in general, why does he vote 
against them*”’? If he intends voting against them why does he 
speak in favour of them? If, however, he has studied the subject 
with great diligence, how can he vote for tariffs on iron? Had his 
studies been worth a penny, he couldn’t fail to have discovered 
that there are two ironworks in Germany, the Dortmunder Union 
and the Kénigs- und Laurahiitte, either of which is capable of 
meeting the entire domestic demand; besides these there are many 
smaller ones; hence that a protective tariff is utter nonsense in this 
case; that the only remedy in this case is the capture of the foreign 
market, hence unadulterated free trade or bankruptcy; also that the 
iron-masters themselves can only want a protective tariff if they 
have formed a ring, a conspiracy which imposes monopoly prices on 
the domestic market, so that they are better able to sell off their 
surplus products abroad at cut prices, which they are in fact already 
doing at this moment. It was in the interests of this ring, this 
conspiracy of monopolists that Kayser was speaking and, insofar as 
he voted in favour of tariffs on iron, was also voting, and 
Hansemann of the Dortmunder Union and Bleichréder of the 
K6nigs- und Laurahiitte will be laughing in their sleeves at the 
stupid Social-Democrat who has, for good measure, studied the 
subject with diligence! 

You: must at all costs get hold of Rudolph Meyer’s Politische 
Gründer in Deutschland. Without a knowledge of the material 
assembled here on the swindles, the crash and the political 
corruption of recent years, it is impossible to form an opinion on 
present conditions in Germany. How is it that this store of riches 
was not exploited at the time for the benefit of our press**’? The 
book is banned, of course. 

The passages in the report” I particularly have in mind are* 
1. those in which so much emphasis i is laid on winning over pe 
opinion—to have this factor against you was to be hamstrung; it 
was a matter of life and death that ‘this hatred be turned into 
sympathy’, etc.—sympathy! from people who just before, during 
the Terror,“ had shown themselves to be dirty blackguards. 
There was no need to go to such lengths, especially as the Terror 

a See this volume, p. 419. 

had long since ended; —2. those to the effect that the party, which 
condemns war in any shape or form (hence also the one which it is 
forced to wage, which it wages notwithstanding) and whose goal is 
the universal fraternisation of all men (in terms of a slogan the 
goal of every party, in terms of immediate reality that of none, for 
not even we wish to fraternise with the bourgeois so long as they 
wish to remain bourgeois), cannot envisage civil war (hence not 
even in a case where civil war is the only means to the end). This 
proposition may also be construed as follows: that a party which 
condemns bloodshed in any shape or form cannot envisage either 
blood-letting or the amputation of gangrenous limbs, or scientific 
vivisection. Why all these empty phrases? I’m not asking that all 
your language should be ‘vigorous’, I am not reproaching the 
Report for saying too littlke—on the contrary, there is much that 
would have been better left unsaid. The next part is much better 
and so Hans Most* has fortunately overlooked the few passages 
out of which he could have made capital. 

But it was a blunder to insert a solemn announcement in the 
Sozialdemokrat to the effect that Liebknecht had taken the Saxon 
oath of allegiance. Hans won't let that one pass by,” and his 
anarchist friends will be sure to embroider on it. Marx and I don’t 
consider the matter itself to be as dangerous as, e.g., Hirsch took it 
to be in the heat of the moment. You people must know whether 
‘Paris vaut bien une messe’,? as Henri IV said when he became a 
Catholic, thus sparing France a thirty years’ war,*? and whether 
the advantages are of a kind to justify such inconsistency and the 
taking of an oath which, moreover, is the only one which cannot 
entail a prosecution for perjury. But once it had been taken, 
nothing ought to have been said about it until others had kicked 
up a fuss; that would have been time enough to go on to the 
defensive. But for the Sozialdemokrat, Hans wouldn’t have heard a 
word about it. 

I was delighted at the lambasting you gave the notorious 
drunkard and wastrel.**’ We shall see that this is spread about in 
Paris, though we are stumped for the French words that would 
convey the foregoing pithy expressions. 

We are, by the way, fully aware that it is all very well, as they 
say, for us here to talk, and that your position is much more 
difficult than ours. 

That the petty bourgeois and peasants should be joining us is, I 
grant you, a sign of the movement’s rapid progress, but it also 

a Johann Most - > Paris is really worth a Mass. 

constitutes a danger to the movement, once one forgets not only 
that these people have got to come, but also that they are coming 
simply because they have got to. Their joining us proves that the 
proletariat really has become the leading class. But since the ideas 
and ambitions they bring with them are those of the petty 
bourgeois and the peasant, it must not be forgotten that the 
proletariat would forfeit its leading historical role were it to make 
concessions to those ideas and ambitions. 

Most cordially yours, 

F. Engels 
Herewith another loose postscript.*