Manchester, 4 April 1869 
86 Mornington Street 

Dear Lessner, 

I was very pleased to have word from you, and enclose the 
photograph requested. The Becker story* together with other 
material I expressly placed ready a week ago, in order to send it to 
Marx, but the womenfolk put the stuff somewhere else each 
morning, so I forgot it day after day. Tomorrow I shall take the 
package into town, and send Becker directly to you. 

The compliments you have so undeservedly paid me shame me 
all the more since, unfortunately, in the last 18 years, I have been 
able to do as good as nothing directly for our cause, and have had 
to devote all my time to bourgeois activities. I hope this will soon 
change, I expect in a few months once again to be master of my 
time, and I shall then surely do my part to earn your 
compliments; it will always be a pleasure for me to bash the same 
enemy on the same battlefield together with an old comrade like you. 
You are right; the cause goes better than ever before; years ago, at a 
time when the stupid democratic mob complained about reaction 
and the people’s indifference to them, we, Moor and I, were right in 
foreseeing in the period of this reaction the enormous industrial 
development of the last 18 years and declared this would result in a 
sharpening of the contradictions between labour and capital, and 
more acute class struggle. It would make a donkey laugh to see how 
these stupid democrats have now really been duped, so that there is 
not even a decent little place for them in any other corner of the 
world. The Party of Progress in Germany,*” republicans in France, 
radicals in England, all of them equally rotten. There is nothing 
funnier than the sweet-sour compliments they have to make to the 
social movement, though they know full well that, one fine day, 
this social movement will have its foot on their necks. 

In old friendship 

Your 
F. Engels