[London, 30 July 1852] 

... Huzel’s letter was greeted with Homeric laughter. It gave 

rise to the following intermezzos: 

5 Sutton Str., Soho 
Office of The People’s Paper 

‘To Dr Johann Gottfried Kinkel 

‘You are alleged, or so I am informed, to have ventured the 
following statement before Anneke or other Germans at Cincin- 
nati: “Marx and Engels etc.” (there follows the treasonable 
passage). I await your answer by return of post. Silence will be 
regarded as an admission. 

Dr Karl Marx 

This note was kept deliberately vague: ‘alleged ... Anneke or 
other Germans’, etc. in order to leave Mr Kinkel plenty of latitude 
for ambiguities. The following reply arrived by return: 

1 Henstridge Villas, St. John’s Wood, 
24th July 1852 
To Dr Karl Marx 

Since the article about me was published under your auspices during my 
imprisonment, I have wanted to have nothing more to do with you. If you believe 
that you can, through the testimony of Anneke or other honourable men, rather 

than through anonymous insinuations, provide proof that I untruthfully said or 
published anything detrimental to your own or Mr Engels’ honour, I must point 
out to you, as I would to anyone with whom I have neither personal nor political 
contacts, the usual way which, under the law, is open to everyone who feels himself 
insulted or libelled. Except in this way, I shall have no further dealings with you. 

Gottfried Kinkel 

1 have not succeeded in making the final stroke of the pen as 
in the original. N’est-ce pas” very cunning? I am to have recourse 
to an English court on account of insults offered at Cincinnati. 
And how coolly everything is rejected that might smack of a duel 
and the like. 

Since I could only assume that the worthy Gottfried Kinkel, who 
drops the Johann when in public, would refuse to accept further 
letters bearing a Soho postmark, I hit upon the following ruse. I 
asked Ernest Jones to write the address and Lupus to post the 
letter itself in Windsor, where he had business. Inside the 
envelope, Gottfried found a second little billet-doux, its margin 
adorned with a posy of forget-me-nots and roses printed in colour 
and with the following content: 

24th July 1852 
5 Sutton Str., Soho 
Office of The People’s Paper 

“To Dr Johann etc. Kinkel 

‘In juxtaposition 
with a written statement, now before me, by your guarantor Huzel, 
whom at Cincinnati you cravenly required to give his word of 
honour to keep silent about your mendacious gossip there, a 
promise which, however, was given only conditionally by Huzel; 

‘with a letter, likewise before me, written at some time by Dr 
Gottfried Kinkel in his own hand to his ex-guarantor Cluss,'” in 
which the same Kinkel boasts of his intention to enter into political 
relations with me: 

‘your letter—and this is precisely why it was provoked—provides 
a new and striking proof that the said Kinkel is a cleric whose 
baseness is only equalled by his cowardice. 

Dr Karl Marx” 

This last was self-complacently pocketed by Mr ‘Johann etc.’ and 
is now circulating among the ranks of the émigrés. But the cream 
of the jest will only become plain to Kinkel later on, with the 
appearance of the first instalment of The Great Men of the Exile. 
Namely, that, shortly before this fearsome attack on Gottfried, I 
diverted myself by doing him direct and personal injury, while at 
the same time justifying myself in the eyes of the émigré louts. To 
that end I needed something ‘in black and white’ from Johann etc. 

Now for greater matters.— Mazzini, no less, has for the past few 
days been dashing round like mad in an attempt to bring about an 
agreement between all those who officially make up the bourgeois 
emigration here. Also betook himself to Johann etc. And with the 
following result: Mazzini, Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin and Kinkel 
constitute Europe’s Executive. Each member of this authority has 
the right to co-opt 2 subjects of his nationality. However, the 
decision as to these co-options rests with the majority among the 
four originals, i.e. Mazziniz. Accordingly, co-opted among the 
Germans are A. Ruge and A. Goegg. Who among the other 
nationalities, I don’t yet know. Kinkel, for his part, is said to have 
laid down 2 conditions: 1. a demand of 20,000 dollars for his loan. 
This [ hold to be a fabrication. 2. The continued and independent 
existence of the Kinkel-Willich, etc. finance committee. This is no 
more than formal deference to Willich, for in fact it has already 
been decided to transfer the entire loan fund to A. Goegg. Finally, 
Kinkel & Co. will most humbly recognise the Revolutionary 
League in America.” This is the latest turn of events. How far 
they have progressed towards concluding this important treaty or 
whether they are still lingering over the preliminaries I do not 
know. In any case the thing must be noised abroad in America, with 
particular emphasis on the following. At the last guarantors’ 
meeting in London, in May 1852, when the Kinkel-Willich 
committee was definitively elected, Kinkel most solemnly declared 
on his word of honour that if A. Ruge were elected to the 
committee, he himself would walk out, for he would never serve 
on the same committee as a man who had publicly described him 
as an agent of the Prince of Prussia. 

Secondly: What will Weitling & Co. say, if the dollars raised in 
America by Kinkel are expended by the Finance Minister, 
A. Goegg? For this is what is intended, in order to subsidise 
‘K. Heinzen’s’ Janus and to put into circulation the immortal 
articles of Ruge, Heinzen, etc. 

As for Mazzini, this wily enthusiast is steadily descending to the 
level of an Italian ‘Gustav Struve’ or some such. For the past 4 
years he has been shouting ‘Action, action’. Now it so happens that 
the Austrian police in Italy are running in 600 Mazzinists whose 
correspondence is conducted on pocket handkerchiefs in invisible 
ink. But these people have no wish to be detained and their family 
connections are extensive. So Mr Mazzini has received from Italy a 
letter announcing their intention to take ‘action’ in real earnest 
and hit out. All at once, and post festum, ‘sober reason’ stirs in the 
bosom of the bombastic man of action, and he adjures them for 
God’s sake to lie low, since on their own they can do nothing, the 
country is swarming with foreign soldiers, and = similar loci 
communes” none of which are either more or less true now than 
they were in 1849. Action, action! Italia fara da sé! 

A few days ago Lupus met an Italian member of Mazzini’s 
committee and taxed him with most of these absurdities. What of 
it? retorts the Roman, more than 600 people are killed in a battle. 
However, since the Italians fear that in this way they will sy anp By 
be caught, shot or locked up, and since this or that victim of his 
exhortations is sending relatives to London, our man of action is 
afraid that some misunderstanding may lead to his being stabbed 
by a deluded and frenzied fellow-countryman; so every night he 
changes his lodgings on the pretext of having to hide from the 
Austrians. Yet it is not Austrians but ‘deluded’ Italians from whom 
he abjectly slinks into hiding. Surely this antipope deserves the 
gallows? To harass, tease, wear down a nation in this way! The 
inevitable result, particularly in the case of a people like the 
Italians, is a state of appalling, passive dejection, of complete and 
utter collapse. 

Our people were to have appeared before the jury in Cologne 
yesterday, but suddenly came the announcement of a further 
adjournment because one of the witnesses for the prosecution, 
Schulz, a police official in Berlin, had fallen ill. So if Mr Schulz 
were to die, the defendants might well remain under preliminary 
investigation until doomsday. In the meantime Becker is going 
blind and Daniels is getting consumption. C'est par trop infâme! In 
all this, the bourgeois press is playing a most abominable role. 

I saw the notice of adjournment in the Kélnische Zeitung. A few 
days earlier I had received the following report from Cologne. 

“When Becker was arrested the following letters from you were seized; those of 
8.2.51, 21.2.51 and 9.4.51. From the latter the ensuing passages have been picked 
out by the prosecution as exceptionally incriminating: “Herewith the jolly scribble 
from the School of Kinkel. 15 shillings have accumulated here f.1.1.4 10 shillings are 
still outstanding, having been promised but not yet collected. I shall proceed in the 
manner you indicate. So debit me with £1. For owing to the reduced circumstances 
of the member who should pay it, five shillings cannot be collected.” The 
prosecution makes out that the letters f.t.l. stand for “For the League”, while 
Becker claims that they are an abbreviation indicating an arrangement made 
between him and yourself concerning the acquisition of cheaper literature for you 
in London. That passage constitutes one of the chief items in the indictment, since 
there is otherwise hardly any evidence, unless fabricated, against B. Again, the 
indictment, starting in the year 1831, traces the rise of the Communist League 
from an association of Germans in Paris which underwent various modifications 
under the names “League of Germans”,!?4 “League of the Just”,!75 but continued 
uninterruptedly right up to the present society now appearing in the dock. This 
information apparently derives from data provided by the Hanoverian govern- 
ment. The prosecution attaches no importance whatever to the split in London in 
1850 '5; in their opinion this was simply a personal squabble, the whole lot of them 
were, after all, pursuing the same criminal aims and shared the same views and 
would, moreover, act in concert at the hour of decision, Thus, besides the two 
addresses previously published in the press, a 3rd has been incorporated in the 
indictment; this address is said to be dated June or July 1850'76 and to have been 
intercepted in Leipzig. 

‘The only statements of any note are those of the witnesses Haupt, who gave a 
fairly detailed and comprehensive story, and Hentze, an ex-lieutenant, who to some 
extent attacked Becker. On Saturday Erhardt, a cashier with Stein, the banker, was 
arrested on the same charge. He is said to be slightly compromised by reason of 
the recommendation he gave to Nothjung and of a few letters discovered on the 
latter which seemed to indicate some understanding between the two... By the way, 
so nicely have the jurymen been selected that, if you consider the odds, the State 
could not be better placed.’ 

The most important news politically is the treaty concluded 
between Prussia, Austria and Russia during the Czar’s visit to 
Vienna.” It was first announced in The Morning Chronicle the day 
before yesterday. Yesterday there was a reprint of it in The Times, 
so you will be able to read it for yourself. Here the election results 
are such that the Tories, who will drop the Corn Law question, 
possess a large counter-revolutionary majority on all other issues 
and this Cabinet will, I believe, give way before nothing short of a 
more or less revolutionary manifestation. The bourgeois now 
realise what a blunder they made in failing to draw the political 
conclusions from their anti-Corn Law victory in 1846. Ils y 
penseront. My list of printing errors for the Brumaire will soon 

moulder away; had I realised this would happen, I should have 
done better to send you for postage the money thus expended. 
But as Spinoza tells us, it is a comfort to consider all things sub 
specie aeterni.