[Extract] 

[London,] 4 February 1878 

You are mistaken, if you believe that Disraeli is in my opinion a 
great man. He was always a self-seeker, and such people, whatever 
their natural gifts, are always deficient. But, dans le royaume des 
aveugles les borgnes, etc.*! 

You are still more mistaken, if you consider Lord Commonplace 
as a small man or an adversary easily to be borne down! He is, on 
the contrary, the mightiest man in the British Empire. On the one 
hand, the oldest nobility man, on the other the intellectual 
incarnation of the great middle-class. Business is business—this is 
the only serious part of your bourgeois: everything else is 

a Dans le royaume des aveugles les borgnes sont rois—In the kingdom of the blind the 
one-eyed is King. - > The Earl of Derby (see also this volume, p. 296). 

show—and must, consequently, be got rid of by mild talk, 
conventional utterances, inane twaddle. What a power, therefore, 
the Lord of Commonplace! If an Earl of Derby did not exist, the 
decaying nobility and the upstart brokers ought to have invented 
him..." 

Turkey and Austria were the last props of the old State System of 
Europe... It will go now altogether to the wall, expiring in a 
succession of wars, which will precipitate the Social Crisis and 
engulf all the so-called Powers, those sham-powers, victors and 
vanquished—to make room for a European Social Revolution. 

One way or another our enemies are digging their own graves!