ENGELS TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT”

London, 27[-28] May 1872

Dear Liebknecht,

Mrs Marx has shown me Eccarius’ letter to you” and the only
possible construction it permits is the one you have put on it and
which we have already arrived at from other evidence, namely that
Eccarius is mad. How deeply we have intrigued against him you
can infer most easily from the fact that I have never said a word
to you about the whole clique. Now, however, it is essential to put
you au fait.

We have absolutely no idea what Eccarius can have in mind
when he talks about intrigues directed against him ever since
1869 (!). I only know that up to September 1870, when I arrived
here,’ Marx, for the sake of their longstanding friendship, had
always helped him out of the mess he had got into often enough
with the English,” and whenever Marx himself had a row with
the English it was on Eccarius’ account, since the latter had always
treated the International as his literary property and had been
guilty of the gravest indiscretions in his Congress reports in The
Times and in his reports to American papers. In short, he had
always exploited the situation for his own literary ends. All this

could be tolerated up to a certain point and we confined ourselves
to rebuking him in private, but the offences were always repeated.

All of a sudden Eccarius announced that he was resigning his
office as General Secretary and would absolutely refuse to stand for
re-election. We had therefore to choose a successor who, in the
circumstances, could only be an Englishman. Hales and Motters-
head stood as candidates and Hales was elected. What Eccarius’
intentions had been was something we only discovered later when
he told Mottershead that he had simply gone on strike so as to
receive 30/- a week instead of 15/-. He had thought he was
indispensable, and when this plan went wrong he twisted the facts
to make it appear that Marx had intrigued with Hales to get him
thrown out, and I am firmly convinced that he himself believes
this now, although no-one could have been more surprised by his
abdication than us.

Then came the Conference.* Both the General Council and the
Conference itself had resolved that the meetings should be held in
private. An explicit resolution, of which you are aware, charged
the General Council with the task of deciding which resolutions
should be made public and which not. Yet, a few days after the
Conference an article appeared in The Scotsman’ and The
Manchester Guardian with a detailed report on a number of the
Conference sessions together with the Conference resolutions.
This report then went through the entire English and European
press. You can imagine the uproar this provoked. Everyone cried
treason and called for an example to be made of the traitor. In all
the International papers a chorus of abuse fell on the General
Council for allowing such matters to appear in the bourgeois press
while our own papers were starved of news.

We knew at once who the traitor was. Reports had appeared
only about those sessions where Eccarius had been present. On the
others there was not a single word, except for a garbled account of
some of the resolutions. Marx took the first opportunity when we
had Eccarius on his own to accuse him to his face and to advise
him in all friendliness to MAKE A CLEAN BREAST OF IT, to accept his
punishment and to be more discreet in future. He [Eccarius] did
in fact go to see Jung, the president of the ad-hoc investigating
commission, and told him that he had indeed given the local office
of the New York World an article about the Conference, but on
the explicit condition that its content was not revealed to the
English press. However, he was perfectly aware of the unprinci-

pled character of these people and of their connections with the
English provincial press and must also have known that he had no
right to sell the Conference transactions to the American press. In
the process he made all sorts of lame excuses, saying that the
English article contained statements not in the American article, so
that someone else must have talked, and that someone was Hales
in all likelihood (whose behaviour in all this business had been
perfectly straightforward) and that he was the real traitor. In order to
spare Eccarius, Jung delayed making a decision, but finally Eccarius
was reprimanded, and since then this man, who would be ready any
day to sell the entire International for a mess of pottage, has been all
injured innocence.

Despite this we were foolish enough—and you can see from this
how we have been intriguing against him—to propose and carry
his nomination as American secretary.”

Since Hales’ nomination a war to the knife has broken out
between Eccarius and Mottershead, on the one hand, and Hales,
on the other. The English have split into 3 parties, one anti-Hales,
one pro-Hales, and a number of more or less neutral people in
the middle. Hales also committed a host of follies—he is terribly
vain and wants TO STAND FoR HacKney* NEXT ELECTION-—but the attacks on
him by the others were so ludicrously absurd that he was almost
always in the right. In order to put an end to the commotion,
which came to occupy the General Council almost to the exclusion
of everything else, we were forced to appoint a sort of Comité de
salut public? to which all personal matters are referred.” It is
scarcely necessary to add that we did not hesitate to give Hales a
good dressing-down when he deserved it, and that was often
enough, just as we did to Eccarius or anyone else.

At all events, Hales still has the trust of the East End
workers—our best people here—whereas Eccarius has associated
with the most degenerate and suspect elements all of whom are
hand in glove with the GREAT LIBERAL PARTY,

When the BarairisH Feperat Councn.**? was formed, Mottershead,
Eccarius & Co. were not invited since they did not represent any
working men’s associations. The way in which this was done was
irregular and was criticised in the General Council, but it was very
necessary if a repetition of the same business were to be avoided.

This means, according to Eccarius, that we had chosen the
DAMNABLE SIDE.

As for America, the split took place immediately after the Con-
ference *?; the sub-committee (the secretaries) were supposed
to report on the matter and since it was Marx who had largely
conducted the American correspondence up to then, he took over
the mess and all the letters went to him. It goes without saying
that Eccarius’ position as secretary was virtually suspended until
the General Council could reach a decision on the whole business.
There was in fact no writing to be done. He seems to have
regarded this as yet another insult. When it came to a decision,
Eccarius took the part of Sorge’s enemies. These consist of 1) a
few Frenchmen who, like Malon & Co. in Geneva, want to be in
command simply because they are Frenchmen and in part
refugees of the Commune; 2) supporters of Schweitzer (Grosse &
Co.); 3) the Yankee bourgeois friends of Mesdames Woodhull and
Claflin, people who have got a bad name for themselves through
their practice of rreELove and who print anything and everything—
A UNIVERSAL GOVERNMENT, spiritism (a@ la Home) and so forth—
anything but our stuff. The latter have now declared in reply to
the resolutions of the General Council* that the International will
only make progress in America if we throw out as many
‘WAGE-SLAVES’ as possible, since they were certain to be the first to
sell themselves to the Bocus REFORMERS AND TRADING POLITICIANS.”*”

Sorge and Co. have also made a number of formal blunders, but
if the International in America is not to degenerate into a
bourgeois tricksters’ society pure and simple, they must have our
full support. The good Germans (almost all the Germans), the best
Frenchmen and all the Irish are on their side.

Our friend Eccarius, however, had foreseen that the organ of
Section 12, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, might provide him with a
new literary refuge and so we are ON THE DAMNABLE SIDE.

In short, Eccarius has become thoroughly demoralised in his
relations with the English agitators and TRADING POLITICIANS AND
Trapes-UNIONS PAID SECRETARIES, all of whom either have been bought
by the middle class or are begging them to make them an
offer. His personal situation, which was truly wretched, though
partly through his own fault, and finally his literary ambitions
have been contributing factors. He has gone so far that I have
abandoned all hope for him. I am very sorry for him, both as an
old friend and collaborator as well as an intelligent person, but I
cannot conjure the facts out of existence. Moreover, in his

cynicism he admits it all quite openly. But if he imagines that we
conspired against him and wished to expel him from the General
Council, he is somewhat exaggerating his own importance. The
opposite is the case: we let him go his own way despite countless
opportunities to throw the book at him and we have not done so.
We have confronted him with the truth only where it was quite
unavoidable. But it was simply out of the question for us to stand
aside while he turned the International into his own milch cow,
riding roughshod over all other considerations.

Incidentally, Lochner, Lessner, Pfdénder and Frankel are all
completely in the picture about Eccarius, and if you write to any
one of them, you will be unlikely to receive such a cool and
dispassionate reply as from me.

28 May. News has come from America today. The separatist
Federal Council is now in process of complete dissolution.
Madame Woodhull and her Yankee friends from Sections 9 and
12 have held a meeting to push her candidature as President of the
United States”? on the basis of a programme which contains
everything under the sun except capital and labour, and have
made complete fools of themselves into the bargain.* It was all just
too much. The Lassallean Section 6 has deposed its delegate,
Grosse, accepted the resolutions of the General Council and has
sent a delegate to Sorge’s Federal Council. Ditto Section 2, the
worst of the French sections, which has also parted company with
the separatist Council. Another 6 sections are about to follow suit.
More details in the next Eastern Post.” You can see what sort of
people Eccarius cultivated over there; all his private correspon-
dents, Maddock, West, Elliott, etc., were present and spoke at the
Woodhull meeting.

All these matters are between ourselves, the deliberations of the
General Council are not my property and I am telling you of them
here simply for your and Bebel’s own private information.

The Belgians have debated a revision of the Rules but have not
reached any conclusions.© Hins has tabled a draft proposing
abolition of the General Council.”* I would be quite contented
with that personally; Marx and I will not re-enter it anyway and as
matters stand at present we have scarcely any time to work and
that is something that has to stop.

A letter to you from Marx" has gone off today. It contains the

declaration of the General Council against the petty intriguers
here who have acquired a certain importance thanks to the
bourgeois press on the Continent.*

Regards to your wife” and children, ditto Bebel.

Your
F. E.