TO THE EDITOR? OF THE DAILY NEWS

Sir,
According to a telegram of Reuter’s,”

“Herr Bucher, Councillor of Legation, is designated for the post of secretary and
keeper of the records of the Congress.” 266

Should this “Herr Bucher” be the same Lothar Bucher who,
during his long London exile, shone as a staunch partisan of the late
Mr. David Urquhart, whose anti-Russian doctrines he held forth
week by week in the Berlin National Gazette‘; the same Lothar
Bucher who, on his return to Berlin, turned so ardent a votary of
Ferdinand Lassalle that the latter named him his testamentary
executor, bequeathed him an annual revenue, and transferred the
copyright of his works to Lothar Bucher*’? Soon after Lassalle’s
death Lothar Bucher entered the Prussian Foreign Office, was
made a “Councillor of Legation’, and became Bismarck’s confidential man-of-all-work.

He had the naiveté to address a letter to myself, inviting me, of
course with the sanction of his master, to undertake the money
article of the Prussian official Staats-Anzeiger.

The pecuniary terms were left to my discretion, while I was
expressly told I should enjoy full liberty of treating the operations
and the operators of the money market from my own “scientific”

a W. K. Hales.— Ed
b “We have received the following telegrams through Reuter’s Agency: Eastern
Affairs, Berlin, June 11.” In the section Latest Intelligence, The Times, No. 29279,

June 12, 1878.— Ed.
© National-Zeitung.— Ed.

standpoint. Since this odd incident I felt not a little amused at seeing
Lothar Bucher’s contributions as a member of the “International
Working Men’s Association” daily and yearly chronicled in the
columns of the Vorbote,* an organ of the International, edited by
Johann Philipp Becker at Geneva. If this be not a case of mistaken
identity, and if there be anything in the reports that the Russian and
German Governments, a propos of the attempts of Hoedel and
Nobiling,** intend to propose to the Congress international
measures against the spread of Socialism, then Herr Bucher is the
very man to tell the Congress authoritatively that the organisation,
the action, and the doctrines of the German Social-Democratic party
have no more to do with these attempts than with the sinking of the
Grosser Kurfürst,° or with the meeting of the Congress at Berlin; that
the panic-mongering arrests throughout Germany and the whirlwind
of dust raised by the Press-reptiles?”° serve the exclusive purpose of
an electioneering cry for a Reichstag ready to sanction at last the
solution, long since elaborated by Prince Bismarck, of the paradox
problem how to endow the German Government with all the
financial resources of a modern State, while, at the same time,
reimposing upon the German people the ancient political regime
scattered to pieces by the hurricane of 1848.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

Karl Marx

London, June 12