Under the heading “A Socialist Soirée”, signed W.,’ the Vienna 
Presse carries a feature article in which I have the honour to figure. 
W. met me, so he says,at a soirée at Herzen’s house. He even recalled 
the speeches that I made there. 

A firm opponent of Herzen, I have always refused to meet him, 
and have therefore never seen the man in my life. 

I doubt whether the imaginative W. has ever been to London. 
As a matter of fact, there are no “marble steps” there, except in the 
palaces, though W. even found some in Herzen’s “corrace”! 

I hereby challenge the imaginative W., whom the laurels of the 
Paris-Journal and similar police newspapers” will not allow 
to sleep, to name himself. 

Karl Marx 
London, June 30, 1871 

Frederick Engels 

[THE ADDRESS THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE AND 
THE ENGLISH PRESS] 

London, 30 June. No publication in the history of London has 
caused such a stir as the Address of the General Council of the 
International.’ In the beginning, the main papers tried to kill it 
with silence, a favourite method of theirs; but a few days were 
enough to prove to them that it would not work this time. The 
Telegraph, Standard, Spectator, Pall Mall Gazette and Times had to 
bring themselves, one by one, to mention this “remarkable 
document” in their leaders.” Then letters from third parties 
started to appear in the papers, drawing attention to this and that 
in particular. Then more leaders, and at the weekend the weeklies 
returned to it once again. The entire press has had to confess 
unanimously that the International is a great power in Europe to 
be reckoned with, which cannot be eliminated by refusing to talk 
about it. They all had to acknowledge the stylistic mastery with 
which the Address is written—a language as powerful as William 
Cobbett’s, according to The Spectator. It was only to be expected 
that this bourgeois press would attack, almost to a man, such an 
energetic assertion of the proletarian point of view, such a decisive 
justification of the Paris Commune. Likewise, that the 
Stieberiades**’ fabricated by the Parisian police papers and the 
documents of quite a different society (Bakunin’s Alliance of 
Socialist Democracy) * laid at the door of the International by Jules 
Favre” would be attributed to it, despite the public disavowals of 
the General Council.‘ In the meantime, however, the commotion 
finally became too much even for the philistine. The Daily News 
began to soothe, and The Examiner, the only paper to behave 
really decently, resolutely stood up for the International in a 
detailed article.‘ Two English members of the General Council, 
Odger, who has long been on much too friendly terms with the 
bourgeoisie, and Lucraft, who seems to have grown much more 
concerned about the opinion of “respectable” people since he was 
elected on to the London School Board, were swayed by the fuss 
in the papers to tender their resignations, which were unanimous- 
ly accepted. They have already been replaced by two other English 
workers and will soon mark what it means to betray the 
proletariat at the critical moment. 

An English parson, Llewellyn Davies, lamented in The Daily 
News about the abuse directed at Jules Favre and consorts in the 
Address and expressed the desire that the truth or falsehood of 
these charges be ascertained, as far as I am concerned, by the 
French Government bringing an action against the General 
Council.’ On the very next day, Karl Marx declared in the same paper 
that as the author of the Address he considered himself personally 
responsible for the charges*; however, the French Embassy does not 
seem to have any orders to proceed with a libel suit against him. 
Finally The Pall Mall Gazette then declared that this was quite 
unnecessary, the private character of a statesman was always 
sacred, and only his public actions could be attacked." Of course, if 
the private characters of the English statesmen were brought 
before the public, the Last Day of the oligarchic and bourgeois 
world would be nigh. 

An article from the Vienna Wanderer by and about the 
scoundrel Netschajeff has been doing the rounds of the German 
press, glorifying his deeds and those of Serebrennikoff and Elpidin. If 
this should occur again, we shall come back to this fine threesome for 
a closer look. For the present, suffice it to say that Elpidin is a 
notorious Russian spy.