Dear Fred,

Laura had completely forgotten to send you the “Tribunes”, laid ready by me for a week. She is now making up for the omission. Ditto a “Workman’s Advocate”. I enclose in this letter:
1) Letter from Vienna from the bookseller. (This you must return.)
2) Dr. Kugelmann.
3) Meyer from Berlin. (I answered these people only today. The lack of time is considerable.)

We have meanwhile crushed the wretched intrigue of Vésinier in Belgium and of Le Lubez in London. The editor of the *Rive Gauche* and friend of Rogeard’s – Longuet –, then Mr Crespel, – the two most intelligent members of the branch he founded – have become members of our Central Committee. His branch has declared against him, for us. The Central Committee has summoned Vésinier “to substantiate his accusations, or to be expelled”.

The fellow reproaches us among other things in the “Echo de Verviers”:
“It (the committee) was entrusted with one of the greatest interests of humanity and it lightheartedly abandons the sublime goal to degenerate into a committee of nationalities in tow of Bonapartism.” And this degeneration occurred, according to him, through our declaration for Poland, against Russia. “Yielding to pernicious influences (the ass imagines that the Polish § of the Programme originated from the Paris delegates, whereas they tried by every possible means to get rid of it as ‘inopportune’), it placed on the programme of the Geneva Congress questions outside the aim of the Association and contrary to right, justice, liberty, fraternity, solidarity of peoples and races, such as: ‘to annihilate Russian influence in Europe, etc.’, and this just at the moment when the Russian and Polish serfs have just been emancipated by Russia, while the Polish nobles and priests have always refused to grant liberty to theirs. It will at least be agreed that the moment is ill-chosen. Before approving these articles, the English members of the committee ought to have asked themselves if it would not be just as urgent to put a stop to the terrifying progress of English pauperism, the prostitution of working women, and the misery of the workers of Great Britain, the famine and depopulation of Ireland, etc.! As for the German member of the committee, let him also tell us whether the influence of M. de Bismarck’s policy does not equally need to be annihilated in Europe; are not Prussia and Austria co-partitioners of Poland and accomplices in Russia’s crime against that unhappy nation; and as for the so-called delegates from Paris, are they well placed to brand Russian influence, while Bonaparte’s soldiers occupy Rome after having bombarded it, massacring the defenders of the Mexican republic after having destroyed the French republic? Let the faults and crimes committed by the governments be compared, and one will be convinced that no people must be placed under the ban of humanity for the misdeeds of its oppressors, that the duty of the central committee was to proclaim solidarity, fraternity among all peoples, and not to place a single one of them under the ban of Europe.”

Then he added the lie:
“This enormous blunder has already had fatal consequences: the Poles have asked in a mass to join the Committee, and shortly they will be in an immense majority. (A single one – for Holtorp does not count and is himself conspiring with Le Lubez – Captain Bobzinski, is in it). Already they make no bones about saying that they will use the Association to help in the re-establishment of their nationality, without troubling themselves about the question of the emancipation of the workers.”

The Poles – they had just sent us a deputation – laughed out loud when these passages were read out. We are celebrating their Revolution on 23 Jan. You will be amused by the wiseacre Dennis’s closing prayer to Proudhon. This “sensational writer”, with his semi-learning, with his Lassallean parade of science, of which he knew nothing, with his seemingly critical superiority over the socialist sectarians, has done a great deal of harm. Le Lubez is a nonentity. Fox rightly calls him “Le Père enfant-tin”, but Vésinier is quite the man for the Russians. As a writer not worth much, as his “Vie du Nouveau César” and his other pamphlets against Bonaparte show. But with talent, great rhetorical power, much energy, and above all through and through unscrupulous.

Salut
D
K M