In the Libero. Penstero of March 28, Mr. Stefanoni rightly 
foresaw that, despite his misfortune with Liebknecht,'’? I would 
continue to reply with silence to his incessant slanders. If I now 
break this silence, it is because Mr. Karl Vogt, a man whom I 
politically and morally assassinated in Germany with my book Herr 
Vogt, is revealed to be the inspiration behind the assertions of his 
coreligionist Stefanoni. 

Mr. Stefanoni cites, taking it from Vogt’s book* against me and 
the German communist party in general, the fairy story about my 
relations with the spy Cherval. Yet he takes care to suppress the 
letter from J. Ph. Becker of Geneva which exposes Vogt’s crass 
inventions in the most humorous fashion (see Herr Vogt, p. 21).° 

This slander and others of like nature, with which Vogt fills his 
smutty book, were reproduced a few days after it was published in 
the National Zeitung of Berlin. I immediately commenced legal 
proceedings for libel in London. In accordance with Prussian law, 
I had to go first through a preliminary procedure, in other words, 
obtain permission from the courts to prosecute the editor‘ of the 
National Zeitung. I therefore had to go up the entire ladder of the 
tribunals, from the investigating magistrate to the supreme court, 
with absolutely no result. In a word, they prohibited me from 
embarking on a trial that would have been so compromising for 

Mr. Vogt (who in his Politische Studien? had precisely invited 
Prussia to take possession of the rest of Germany by force of 
arms), and also so compromising for a newspaper which did the 
government’s work under the mask of a fictitious opposition, and 
which later revealed itself to be the most servile tool of 
Bismarck—a trial, finally, that would give full satisfaction to a man 
who was torn to shreds, on command from above, by the entire 
prostituted press of Germany. 

All the episodes of my struggle with the Prussian tribunals, 
together with the documents I submitted to them in support of my 
case, are to be found printed in my book Herr Vogt, and must 
therefore be familiar to the worthy Mr. Stefanoni too. 

Mr. Stefanoni also cites my Revelations Concerning the Communist 
Trial in Cologne (1853)° in order to prove what? That I had 
relations with the German communists. Of that I am proud. 

Besides, the true purpose of that publication was to show that 
the Communist League was not a secret society according to the 
definition of the penal code, and that for this reason the Prussian 
government was forced to get the notorious Stieber and _ his 
go-betweens to fabricate a series of false documents attributed to 
me and the accused.’*”° Today, in Germany, there is nobody, not 
even among the Bismarckians, who dares to deny this fact. That 
Mr. Stefanoni should make common cause not only with Vogt but 
also with Stieber is too rich, even for an esprit fort of Stefanoni’s 
calibre. 

In your newspaper of April 18, Mr. Stefanoni renews the attack. 
I had given abundant proof in my book that in 1859 Mr. Vogt 
sold himself to Bonaparte, taking up the role of his principal 
agent in Germany and Switzerland. Ten years later, the indiscre- 
tion of his friends Jules Favre and Co. merely served to verify the 
fact."*! 

It is utterly false that I, through some supposed Germanic 
interest, took up the defence of Austria against Mr. Vogt, the 
valiant champion of Italy. In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 
1848-49 I backed the cause of Italy against the majority in the 
German parliament and press. Later, in 1853 and at other times, 
I assumed in the New-York Tribune the defence of a man with 

whose principles I was in perfnanent opposition— Mazzini.* In a 
word, I always took the side of revolutionary Italy against Austria. 

But the war of 1859 was a different matter altogether. I 
denounced it because it would prolong the Bonapartist empire for 
another decade, subject Germany to the regime of the Prussian 
horde and make Italy what it is today.'*?? Mazzini, for once, was of © 
my opinion (see Pensiero e Azione of 2 to 15 May 1859°). He, like 
me, was assailed at that time by the inevitable Mr. Vogt. 

Although I was ready to denounce Mr. Vogt as a Bonapartist 
agent, I nevertheless had to deny the authorship of an anonymous 
circular launched against him by Mr. Kar] Blind. Mr. Stefanoni 
quotes, following Vogt, the declarations which the latter obtained 
from the publisher‘ and printers with the aim of proving that 
Blind was not the author of the circular and that it had not been 
printed by the aforementioned publisher. 

Yet if Mr. Stefanoni had read my book, as he claims, he would 
have found reproduced on pages 186-187% the declarations made 
under oath to the English court by the aforementioned printer and 
one of his colleagues,° asserting that it was precisely Karl Blind 
who was the author of the anonymous circular! 

From Vogt, Mr. Stefanoni passes to Herzen. First of all he 
asserts that Herzen attended the foundation meeting of the 
International, and he gives the date of the Association’s foundation 
as 1867. Everybody knows that the International was founded in 
September 1864 at a meeting in Longacre, at which Herzen was 
not present. The evangelist of rationalism, Mr. Stefanoni, handles 
details of time and place exactly like his predecessors in the New 
Testament eighteen centuries ago. Nearly ten years before the 
founding of the International I refused to speak on the same 
platform as Mr. Herzen, the Russian Panslavist, at a public 
demonstration. 

Herzen, in a posthumous book brought to light by his son, a 
book brimming with lies about me,'” does not dare to say that I 

designated him as a Russian spy, as the veracious Mr. Stefanoni 
maintains. Besides, those who thirst for enlightenment about the 
esteem in which the amateur socialist Herzen is to be held have 
only to read Serno-Solovyovich’s pamphlet Our Internal Affairs.* 

I have the honour, Sir, of being your devoted 
Karl Marx 

148, May 28, 1872 and in Il Libero Translated from the Italian