London, 6 April 1868 

Dear Kugelmann, 

The young pair* were registered at a civil ceremony last 
Thursday” (since a church wedding is not legally necessary here), 
and have left for France to celebrate their Honeymoon. They send 
their best greetings to you and Mrs Gertrud. 

Coppel paid a call on me here. Unfortunately, I could not 
receive him, since I was wrapped in cataplasms. Engels was here 
during the wedding, and left again yesterday.” In response to his 
urgings, I have decided to take the arsenic cure, since an end must 
at last be put to this state of affairs. One of his friends in 
Manchester‘ was completely cured by this method in a relatively 
short time. I had certain prejudices against arsenic after reading 
in the Gazette médicale about a discussion among French doctors.“ 

The Irish question predominates here just now. It has naturally 
only been exploited by Gladstone and consorts to take over the 
helm again, and particularly to have an execrorat cry at the next 
elections, which will be based on HOUSEHOLD SUFFRAGE.’ At the moment, 
this turn of affairs is detrimental to the workers’ party, because 
the intriguers among the workers, such as Odger, Potter, etc., who 
want to get into the next Parliament, have now found a new excuse 
for attaching themselves to the bourgeois liberals.* 

This is, however, only a penalty that England—and thus, also, 
the English working class—is paying for the great centuries-old 

@ Paul and Laura Lafargue - > 2 April - © Presumably Schorlemmer (see this 
volume, p. 12).-4 ‘Traitement arsénial de la phthisie pulmonaire’, Gazette 
médicale de Paris, 11 January 1868. - © This English phrase is given in brackets after 
its German equivalent. 

crime against Ireland. In THE Long Run it will benefit the English 
working class itself. You see, the English ESTABLISHED CHURCH IN 
IRELAND—OR WHAT THEY USE TO CALL HERE THE Irish church—is the religious 
bulwark of English Lanptorpism IN Ireland and, at the same time, the 
outpost of the Established Church in England itself (I am speaking 
here of the Established Church as a landowner). The overthrow of 
the Established Church in Ireland would mean its fall in England, 
and the two will be followed (in their downfall) by Lanp.orpism, first 
in Ireland and then in England. And I have always been 
convinced that the social revolution must begin seriously from the 
ground, i.e. from landed property. 

In addition, the whole thing will have the very useful result that, 
once the Irish Church is dead, the Protestant Irish TENANTS in the 
province of Ulster will make common cause with the Catholic 
TENANTS and their movement in the 3 other provinces of Ireland, 
whereas so far LanpLorpism has been able to exploit this religious 
antagonism. 

The day before yesterday I received a letter from Freiligrath 
(wedding cards were, of course, sent to him), containing the 
following curious sentence.*—It will perhaps amuse you more, 
however, if I enclose the letter itself, which I now do. But you must 
return it to me. So that you understand the letter properly, the 
following: In Berlin, shortly before my book* came out, there 
appeared Zwélf Streiter der Revolution von G. Struve und Gustav 
Rasch. In this publication, Freiligrath is acclaimed as ‘one’ of the 
12 apostles and, at the same time, it is proved in great detail that 
he never was a communist, in fact that it was only through too 
GREAT A CONDESCENSION that he became associated with such monsters 
as Marx, Engels, Wolff, etc.” Since Wolff was slandered here too, I 
wrote to Freiligrath for an explanation, particularly since I knew 
that G. Rasch (a scoundrel) headed his begging committee in 
Berlin. He replied very dryly, and with evasive philistine cunning. 
Later I sent him my book without, however, as was formerly our 
mutual custom, signing it. He appears to have taken the unr. 

My best regards to your dear wife and Franzchen. If at all 
feasible, I shall come unper att circumstances and pay you a visit. 

Yours 
K. Marx 

athe first volume of Capital- > G. Struve and G. Rasch, Zwélf Streiter der 
Revolution, Berlin, 1867, pp. 59-61. : 

Apropos. Borkheim will visit you IN a Few pays. Don’t forget that, 
despite all comradeship with him, I always observe reserve! 

Liebknecht’s paper* is much too narrow-mindedly ‘southern’. 
(He has not enough dialectic to strike out on two sides at once.) 

b