London 26 Sept. 1868. Dear Fred, Best thanks for £5. These lousy little shopkeepers are a miserable class. My wife promptly took the money to the house of the bootmaker. The man himself had in the meantime ‘gone broke’ (and in his way he is a quite respectable fellow); his wife, weeping, received the money for him. The great, the greatest part of these shopkeepers goes through all the miseries of the proletariat, plus the ‘anxiety’ and the ‘bondage of respectability’, and without the compensating self-esteem of the better workers. A propos. The recent squabble among the Trades Union authorities, which has for years virtually paralysed them, has finally been settled. The London Trades’ Council (Odger et Co.), London Workingmen’s Association (Potter et Co.) and the Amalgamated Trades’ Unions (the chief seat, I believe, now in Sheffield, it changes annually) have finally agreed upon common action. The bourgeois campaign against the Trades’ Unions has brought about this result. I am sending you back the last issues of the Schweitzer, so that you may perhaps need them for the article for Wilhelm. Keep them in Manchester, but so that they can be found again if necessary. I do not think that S. had any inkling of the impending blow. Had that been the case, he would scarcely have clattered so triumphantly about the ‘tight organisation’. I believe that the ‘International Working Men’s Association’ prompted the Prussian government to this decisive blow. But as for S.’s ‘warmly fraternal’ letter to me, it is explained simply by his fear that, after the Nuremberg resolution, I might now openly come out for Wilhelm and against him. Such a polemic would after the Hamburg affair (le bon homme had written to me asking me to oblige him by coming to Hamburg myself, ‘so that the well-deserved laurel wreath might be pressed upon me’!) have become embarrassing. For the German working class the most necessary thing of all is that they cease to agitate under high official permission. A race so bureaucratically drilled must undergo a full course in ‘self-help’. On the other hand, they have the unconditional advantage that they begin the movement under much more developed conditions of time than the English and, as Germans, have heads on their shoulders for generalising. Eccarius is full of praise for the parliamentary decorum and tact — especially compared with the French at Brussels — that prevailed at the Nuremberg Congress. Spain still looks dubious; but it seems to me that the movement can at most be suppressed for a short time. One thing I cannot grasp, namely that the leaders did not wait until the ‘innocent’ had left Spain and was visiting Bonaparte. Might not the latter himself have had a hand in the affair?
Salut D. K. M.
One of the most ridiculous operations of Schweitzer — to which, however, he was unconditionally forced by the prejudices of his army and as president of the General Association of German Working Men — is constantly swearing in verba magistri and, with every new concession to the needs of the real working-class movement, anxiously arguing that it does not contradict the dogmas of the sole-saving Lassallean creed. The Hamburg Congress sensed quite correctly, instinctively, that the General Association of German Working Men as the specific organisation of the Lassallean sect is endangered by the real working-class movement through trades unions, etc., and that through official participation in it it would lose the distinctiveness that constitutes its point d’honneur and raison d’être.