In your issue of June 22 this year there is a dispatch from London 
in which the following passage occurs: 

“Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and August Willich ... have written to The Spectator 
that spies from the Prussian embassy are following every step they take, etc. The 
Spectator comments briefly upon their long letter of complaint, as follows: ‘This class of 
people (namely political refugees) errs very frequently in such matters, and in fact 
their error springs from two sources: vanity, which deludes them into thinking that 
they are much more important than is really the case, and secondly the consciousness 
of their own guilt. The suspicions expressed by the refugees against the liberal- 
minded and hospitable English Government are nothing more and nothing less 
than an impertinence.’”* 

One does not have to be intimately acquainted with the general 
attitude and the firmly established conventional forms of the English 
daily press to discover immediately that no English paper, and least 
of all the accomplished and witty Spectator, could make a comment so 
clumsily Prussian in both content and form. The whole of the above 
“comment” from The Spectator is a shameless forgery by the correspon- 
dent. Not only does not a word of it appear in The Spectator, but on the 
contrary, the editors of this newspaper make the following remark in 
the same issue that contains our statement. 

“A letter in another page makes an extraordinary charge against our own 
Government. We know nothing more than is to be obtained from a perusal of the 
letter itself; but a charge publicly made, in so circumstantial a manner with so much 
verisimilitude of particulars, ought not to be unregarded. The charge is that of 

favouring the operations of Prussian bloodmen’* in London, in order to [obtain] an 
application of the Alien Act against German patriots.” (The Spectator, June 15, p. 554.) 

The praises accorded to Herr Bunsen in the same article give 
sufficient indication of the interests in which your correspondent 
perpetrated this forgery. Incidentally, Prussian cunning deserves the 
highest marks for this manoeuvre. 

We expect that by publishing this statement in your next issue you 
will leave to your correspondent alone the honour of the authorship 
of this ingenious stratagem. : 

London, July 2, 1850 
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels 

July 10, 1850 : ; ; 

Frederick Engels 

LETTER FROM GERMANY.*” 
THE WAR IN SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN 

Cologne, July 21, 1850 

The all-engrossing topic now in Germany is, of course, the 
Schleswig-Holstein affair. As this affair is in your country, as well as 
in France, very little understood, you will allow me to give a rapid 
view of it. 

It has been shown clearly enough that the small independent states 
by which Germany is surrounded are, under a more or less liberal 
form, the chief seats of reaction. Thus Belgium, the model state of 
Constitutionalism, was the first to resist the shock of February? the 
first to proclaim martial law and to pass sentences of death upon 
patriots.” Thus Switzerland shifted herself in a far from honoura- 
ble way through the revolutionary storm, hiding behind the Chinese 
wall of neutrality as long as revolution was in the ascendant, and 
playing the subservient tool of the Holy Alliance against disarmed 
refugees, when reaction was again rife throughout Europe. It is 
evident that the petty national egotism of those impotent states must 
induce them to rely upon the support principally of old-established, 
i.e. reactionary governments, the more so as they cannot but be 
aware that every European revolution puts their own national 
independence in question, an independence which to uphold none 
are interested but the supporters of the old political system. 

Denmark is another of these petty states sharing this pride of a 
national independence and this exorbitant desire to aggrandise 

themselves.* The independence and power of Denmark, a state 
living only upon the plunder of universal commerce by the Sound 
Dues,’ is of interest to none but Russia and a certain fraction of 
English politicians. Denmark is literally the slave of Russia, by a series 
of treaties agreed to in the last century*”; and through Denmark 
Russia lays hold upon the Dardanelles of the Baltic. The old school 
of English politicians, too, take an interest in the aggrandisement of 
Denmark, according to their old policy of cutting up central Europe 
into a set of small states quarrelling with each other, and thus leaving 
England to apply to them the principle “Divide and conquer”’. 

The policy of the revolutionary party in all countries has, on the 
contrary, always been to strongly unite the great nationalities 
hitherto cut up in small states, and to ensure independence. and 
power, not to those small wrecks of nationalities—such as Danes, 
Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, &c.,&c., counting from one to three millions 
each at the very outset, or to those mongrel would-be nations, such as 
the Swiss and Belgians—but to the large and healthy nationalities 
now oppressed by the ruling European system. An European 
confederacy of republics can only be formed by great and equally 
powerful nations; such as the French, English, German, Italian, 
Hungarian, and Polish nations, but never by such miserably 
powerless so-called nations as the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians, 
Swiss, &c. 

Besides, will the revolutionary party allow the most important 
maritime position of the north, the inlet of the Baltic, to remain for 
ever at the mercy of Danish egotism? Will they allow the Danes to 
make up the interest of their national debt by imposing heavy tolls 
upon every vessel trading across the Sound and Belt? Certainly not. 

Denmark, by that precious hereditary right which treats a people 
as so many chattels, became united with two German countries, 
Schleswig and Holstein. They had separate constitutions, common to 
both of them, and old-established rights granted by their princes, 
“that these countries should for ever remain together and undi- 
vided’’. The law of succession, besides, is different in Denmark to 
what it is in the two duchies. In 1815, at the infamous congress of 
Vienna, where nations were cut up and sold by auction, Holstein was 
incorporated with the German confederacy, but Schleswig was not. 
From that day the Danish national party tried, but in vain, to 
incorporate Schleswig into Denmark. At last 1848 arrived. In March 

* It is a fact not generally known that the annexation of Savoy to Switzerland was 
in 1848-49 much discussed in the latter country, and that the Swiss hoped to see this 
realised by the defeat of the Italian revolution.— Note by Engels. 

a popular movement took place in Copenhagen, and the national 
and liberal party got into office. They instantly decreed a 
constitution, and the incorporation of Schleswig into Denmark. The 
consequence was the insurrection of the duchies, and the war 
between Germany and Denmark.?”’ 

While German soldiers in Posen, in Italy, and in Hungary, fought 
against the revolution, this war in Schleswig was the only revolu- 
tionary war Germany ever carried on. The question was whether the 
Schleswigers were to be forced to follow the fate of small, impotent, 
half-civilised Denmark, and to be the slaves of Russia for ever, or 
whether they should be allowed to re-unite themselves to a nation of 
forty millions, which was then just engaged in the struggle for its 
freedom, unity, and consequent recovery of its strength. And the 
German princes, particularly the royal drunkard of Prussia,* knew 
the revolutionary signification of this war too well. The note” is well 
known by which the Prussian embassy, Major Wildenbruch, 
proposed to the king of Denmark‘ to carry on the war for show, just 
as much as was necessary to allow the Danish and German revolutionary 
enthusiasts who engaged on both sides as volunteers, to devour each other.”° 
Consequently the war was, on the German side, one continued series 
of treasons, down to the battle of Fredericia, where the republican 
Schleswig-Holstein corps, 10,000 men, were surprised and cut up by 
three times their number of Danes, while 40,000 Prussians and 
others were only a few miles off and left them in the scrape; and 
down to the treacherous peace concocted at Berlin,” a peace which 
allows Russia to land troops in Schleswig, and Prussia to march into 
Holstein to put down the rebellion, she herself has aided and abetted 
at least officially. 

If there was any doubt as to which side was the revolutionary, or 
which the reactionary interest, there can be none now. Russia sends 
her fleet to fraternise with the Danes and to blockade, in common 
with them, the shores of Schleswig-Holstein. All the “powers that be” 
are arrayed against this small German tribe of not more than 
850,000 souls; and nothing but the sympathies of the revolutionists 
of all countries is there to assist this small but brave people. They will 
fall no doubt; they may resist a time, and even overthrow the 
treacherous bourgeois government which Prussia has forced upon 
them, they may beat Danes and Russians, but at last they will be 
crushed, unless the Prussian army, which is sure to march into 

Handed by Ludwig Wildenbruch on April 8, 1848.— Ed. ’ 

Holstein, refuses to act. And if this, which is not at all impossible, 
should come to pass, you would see things in Germany take another 
turn. Then there would be a general outbreak, and such a one that 
1848 would be nothing compared to it; for the acts of the Holy 
Alliance have told well upon the German people; and if in ’48 even 
the federative republic was impossible, now nothing would be 
accepted short of the German republic, one and indivisible, democratic 
and—within six months— Social. 

Written on July 21, 1850 Reprinted from the journal