on Financial Affairs and the Election Movement.
Letter of 28 April 1870

Der Volksstaat.
No. 39, 14 May 1870

I was very pleased by the detailed and precise financial report. So many attempts at working-class movements and organisations here in England, before my very eyes, have foundered on bad treasury management and book-keeping, and on the accusations—deserved or undeserved—of embezzlement and so forth that regularly follow, that in this case I may flatter myself that I can form a competent judgment of the importance of this point. The workers must pinch and scrape for every penny and therefore have the fullest right to know where every penny goes, as long as they do not yet need and procure secret funds. And I consider this to be of the greatest importance precisely in Germany, now that the exploitation of the workers by ragged agitators has also been put on the order of the day there. It is a lame excuse to say that by publishing such financial reports one reveals the weakness of one’s own party to the opponent. If the opponents want to judge the strength of a workers’ party by its specifically weak side—its finances—they will invariably miscalculate in any case. And the harm which secrecy surrounding these matters does within one’s own ranks is infinitely greater than any that could arise from publication.—

Bonhorst complains of the apathy of the workers—I find, rather, that things are unexpectedly going ahead briskly in Germany. The individual successes must, of course, be laboriously fought for, and those who have to do the fighting always find that things are moving too slowly. But compare 1860 and 1870, and compare the present state of affairs in Germany with that in France and England—considering the head start those two countries had over us! The German workers have got more than half a dozen people into parliament; the French and the English not a single one. May I permit myself the remark in this connection that we all here consider it most important that at the new elections as many working-class candidates as possible be put up, and as many as possible be got in?