OF PROPERTY. BUT THAT AUGMENTATION must be of indirect benefit to the labouring 
population, etc.” 


“The Morning Advertiser”, April 17, 1863 (Gladstone’s budget speech 
of April 16, 1863). 


“I must say, for one, I should look almost with apprehension and ALARM upon 
this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was 


a Marx’s italics.— Ed. 
b The name is taken from Ch. Dickens’ Little Dorrit.— Ed. 


Reply to Brentano’s Second Article 197 


confined to the CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES. This great increase of wealth 
takes no cognisance at all of the condition of the labouring population. THE 
AUGMENTATION STATED 1s an augmentation entirely confined to the CLASSES POSSESSED OF 
PROPERTY. THIS AUGMENTATION must be of indirect benefit to the labouring 
population, etc.” 


Thus, Gladstone subsequently filched away from the semi- 
official Hansard report of his speech the words that he had 
uttered in the House of Commons on April 16, 1863: “ This 
intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... is an augmentation 
entirely confined to the classes possessed of property.” The Concordia did 
not, therefore, find this in the excerpt provided by their business 
friend in London, and trumpeted: 


“Yet this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone’s speech. Marx has added 
the sentence lyingly, both in form and in content.” 


It is no surprise that they now weepingly tell me that it is the 
critical “‘custom”’ to quote parliamentary speeches as officially 
falsified, and not as they were actually delivered. Such a “custom” 
in fact accords with the “general” Berlin “education”, and the 
limited thinking of the German Manufacturers’ Association, 
which is typical of Prussian subjects.'*? Lack of time forces me to 
end, once and for all, my pleasurable exchange of opinions with 
the Association, but as a farewell, another nut for its “learned 
men” to crack. In what article did a man—and what was his 
name—utter to an opponent of a rank at least equal with that of 
the Concordia, the weighty words: “Asinus manebis in secula 
seculorum” *? 


Karl Marx 
London, July 28, 1872