27 Aug. 1866. Dear Fred, Many thanks for the £10. They arrived just in time. ​ I did not write to Stumpf, precisely because he wanted ‘rules of conduct’ and my view was that the best thing to do was to not ‘conduct’ oneself at all before events had been decided. This was an opinion that I thought it rather better not to give him in writing. Now Mainz, so far as I know, is still encircled, so postal communications are probably also interrupted. Have you written to St.? The Frankfurt comedy affords some compensation for the aroma of the victors. Oh dear! they cried, 25 million! And the mayor hangs himself! And the Prussians, for their part, officially declare that Frankfurt must fork out, because its newspapers ‘insulted’ His Majesty Wilhelm the Conqueror. Stieber, since his government post in Brünn is only interim, will end up as mayor of the Frankfurt-on-Mainers, who, by the way, were always insufferable scoundrels to me. And Edgar Bauer will be imposed upon them as chief censor. As for Eschenheim Lane, however, Privy Councillor Duncker would – but of course he governs in Kassel. ​ I entirely agree with you that one must take the muck as it is. Yet it is pleasant to be at a distance during this youthful time of first love. The presumptuousness of the Prussians, the fatuousness of the handsome Wilhelm, who believes that nothing has changed since the dream of victory except that he has become mighty, etc., will already have their effect. The Austrians now stand where the Prague Slav fanatics wanted them in 1848. Meanwhile, however, their loss of Venice, their enforced concentration of power, is by no means favourable to the Russians. As a pan-Slavist empire itself, they will become all the more antagonistic to the Muscovites. Given the extraordinary rottenness of the Habsburgs, it is, however, to be feared that they will by and by let themselves be led by the Russians into a joint attack on Turkey. For the workers, naturally, everything that centralises the bourgeoisie is favourable. In any case, the peace, even if concluded tomorrow, is still more provisional than that of Villafranca and Zurich was. As soon as ‘arms reform’ has been carried out on the various sides, it’ll be back to ‘fightin’, as Schapper says. In any case, Bonaparte too has received a setback, although the formation of military kingdoms right and left fits in with the Plon-Plonist plan “de la démocratie générale”. Here the government has almost brought about a riot. The Englishman, of course, first needs a revolutionary education, for which two weeks would suffice if Sir Richard Mayne had absolute command. In fact, it hung on a single point. If the railings – and it was on the verge of it – had been used for attack and defence against the police, and some twenty of the latter beaten to death, then the military would have had to ‘intervene’, not just parade. And then it would have become amusing. This much is certain, that these stiff-necked John Bulls, whose skulls seem specially manufactured for the constables’ bludgeons, will get nowhere without a really bloody encounter with the rulers. The sentimental scene between the old ass Beales and the equally great old ass Walpole, then between them the thin-voiced, intrusive, self-important Holyoake, who out of ‘love of truth’ always finds his way into the Times, – nothing but peace and licentiousness. Meanwhile, while this riff-raff pays compliments and slavers, Dog Knox, the police magistrate of Marylebone, growls in a summary manner, which shows what would happen if London were Jamaica. Disraeli has made himself very ridiculous, firstly by the elegiac remark in the House of Commons, ‘he did not know whether he still had a house’, and then by the strong military occupation of that same house, although thirdly the mob (previously instructed by the people from the Reform League) deliberately left the house of Mr ‘Vivian Grey’ untouched. Not a hair was pulled out of this house. Elcho’s window-panes, on the other hand, had all the more to pay for it. I had dropped a hint to Cremer and other managers, whether it might not be appropriate to pay a visit to the Times Newspaper? Since the hint was not immediately ‘understood’ or did not want to be, I did not return to it. The cholera has paid its respects to us (I mean the Londoners) in all seriousness, and the report by Dr Hunter, in the VIII Report of the Health Board published last week, on the ‘Housing of the Poor’, is supposed to serve Madame Cholera as a directory of where to pay her visits preferentially. My best compliments to Mrs Lizzy. Yours KM