London. 25 Sept. 1868. Dear Fred, By all means get the thing done for Liebknecht as quickly as feasible. The fellow will otherwise do it himself anyway and, you may rely upon it, badly. It seems to me a good thing if you also drew attention to what that shitty pamphlet by Bernhard Becker (who slanged us so abominably when he was still “President of Humanity”) stole from your pamphlet and, after bitter experience, endorsed. You can have the pamphlet straight away if you write at once to Strohn, who took it with him to Bradford. The time has begun to kick this “Lassalleanism” “provisionally” away. And we must by no means allow B. Becker’s shitty pamphlet to be hushed up. The “Appeal” of which fiery little Wilhelm speaks is this: I (i.e. in the name of the Intern. Assoc., as its secretary for Germany) must, of course, address some general lines to the German workers, now that their relation to us has changed as a consequence of their various congress decisions. Yet no over-hasty haste is needed in the matter. In all these things “make haste slowly”, and our little Wilhelm

has, as is well known, had no “haste” for 6–7 years in the matter. As for Schweitzer, I had a kind of presentiment that some turning-point was looming somewhere. Although my reply to him had therefore been lying ready for some days – (in which I set him right, especially on the difference between the conditions of a sect movement and a real class movement, with schoolmasterly reserve) – I held the stuff back. And I shall only answer him now, after this new attempt at his trade union educational congress in Berlin has yielded some result. In any case, Schw. has had this one experience with me, that the time taken to answer his letters is always in inverse proportion to their “cordial warmth”. Wilhelm has only one copy left of the 18th Brumaire. How did things go with Vogt’s lectures in the Schiller Institute? The KM Blanqui was constantly present during the Brussels Congress. In a Blue Book on the Crisis of 1857, Cardwell, chairman of the committee of inquiry, that most repulsive old washerwoman among the Peelite old women’s clique, asks Dixon (managing director of a bank in Liverpool that had gone bust) whether the shareholders of the bank consisted largely of women, parsons, and other persons without any insight into banking? By no means, Dixon replies, they were mostly “mercantile men”, but he adds

most knowingly: “The majority of them are people in business; mercantile men; but how far mercantile men can be considered competent to form an opinion on any other business than their own, is rather a question.” Is that not nice? By the way! Moore must send me from his lending library Foster “On Exchange”, since it is not here in the library. I will return it at once.