London, 19 February 1881 

My dear Sir, 

In all haste these few lines in answer to your friendly letter. 

Since my return from Ramsgate ? my health was generally im- 
proving, but the detestable weather, lasting for months, we are pass- 
ing through, has blessed me with a perpetual cold and coughing, in- 
terfering with sleep, etc. But the worst is that Mrs Marx’s state be- 
comes daily more dangerous notwithstanding my resort to the most 
celebrated medical men of London, and I have besides a host of 

* 17 February 

domestic troubles, which it would be tedious entering upon. On the 
other hand, I had and have to struggle through an immense lot of 
blue books 8° sent to me from different countries, above all from the 
United States, so that my working time is hardly sufficient for the 
task, since all night labour has for many years absolutely been inter- 
dicted by my medical advisers. Hence an awful correspondence- 
indebtedness starts me in the face. Just now my whole family is in 
a hubbub because of the removal of my eldest daughter, Madame 
Longuet, with her children,* from London to Paris, where her hus- 
band *— (since the amnesty; he was in the interval Professor of 
King’s College, London) §° —has become one of the editors of the 
Justice (he inspired Clemenceau’s semi-socialistic speech at Marseilles‘). 
You understand how painful— in the present state of Mrs Marx — 
this separation must be. For her and myself our grandchildren, three 
little boys, were inexhaustible sources of enjoyment, of life. 

Now first as to the enclosed manuscript.°° Its author, Mr Lafargue, 
is the husband of my second daughter,‘ and one of my direct dis- 
ciples. He has requested me to try whether through your interference 
he could become a contributor to a Petersburg Review, the Omeuecm- 
eenHoiA Sanucxu or the Caoeo. (I think they are the only ones where he 
might have a chance.) If so, you would be empowered to change or 
suppress anything not suitable to the St Petersburg Meridian. As to 
his ‘name’, the initials would do. At all events it will interest you to 
read the manuscript. 

I have read with the greatest interest your article °* which is in the 
best sense of the word ‘original’. Hence the Boycotting. If you break 
through the webs of routine thought, you are always sure to be ‘boy- 
cotted’ in the first instance; it is the only arm of defence which in their 
first perplexity the routiniers know how to wield. I have been ‘boycot- 
ted’ in Germany for many many years, and am still so in England, 
with that little variation that from time to time something so absurd 
and asinine is launched against me that I would blush to take any 
public notice of it. But try on: The next thing to do—in my opin- 
ion—is to take up the wonderfully increasing indebtedness of the 
landlords, the upper class representatives of agriculture, and show 
them how they are ‘crystallised’ in the retort under the control of the 
‘new pillars of society’. 

@ Jean, Henri and Edgar-° Charles Longuet-° ‘Discours de M. Clemenceau’, La 
Justice, No. 291, 1 November 1880.-4 Laura 

I am very anxious to see your polemics with the Czogo. °' As soon as 
I shall sail in more quiet waters I shall enter more fully upon your Es- 
quisse.* For the present I cannot omit one observation. The soil being 
exhausted and getting not the elements — by artificial and vegetable 
and animal manure, etc.—— to supply its wants, will with the changing 
favour of the seasons, of circumstances independent of human in- 
fluence — still continue to yield harvests of very different amounts, 
though, summing up a period of years, as f. i. from 1870-80, the stag- 
nant character of the production presents itself in the most striking 
character. Under such circumstances the favourable climatic condi- 
tions pave the way to a famine year by quickly consuming and setting 
free the mineral fertilizers still latent in the soil, while vice versa a fam- 
ine year, and still more a series of bad years following it, allow the 
soil-inherent minerals to accumulate anew, and to work efficiently 
with returning favour of the climatic conditions. Such a process goes 
of course everywhere on but elsewhere it is checked by the modifying 
intervention of the agriculturist himself. It becomes the only regulat- 
ing factor where man has ceased to be a ‘power’ — for want of means. 

So we have /870 an excellent harvest in your country, but that year 
is a climax year, and as such immediately followed by a very bad one; 
the year /87/, the very bad harvest, must be considered as the starting 
point for a new little cycle, till we come to the new climax year 1874, 
which is immediately followed by the famine year 1875; then the up- 
wards movement begins again, ending in the still worse famine year 
1880. The summing up of the years during the whole period proves 
that the average annual production remained the same and that the 
mere natural factors have alone produced the changes comparing the 
single years and the smaller cycles of years. 

I wrote you some time ago,” that if the great industrial and com- 
mercial crisis England has passed through went over without the cul- 
minating financial crash at London, this exceptional phenomenon 
was only due to—-French money. This is now seen and acknowl- 
edged even by English routiniers. Thus The Statist (January 29, 1881) 
Says: 

“The money market has only be[en] so easy as it has been during the past year 
through an accident. The Bank of France in the early autumn permitted its stock of gold 

* [N. F. Danielson,] Ouepxu naweeo nopeghopmennazo o6wecmsennazo xozaucmea. Signed: 
Huxoaat — ons.-” See this volume, p. 30. 

bullion to fall from £30 Millions to £22 Millions... Last autumn undoubtedly there was 

a very narrow escape.’ {') 

The English railway system rolls on the same inclined plane as the 
European Public Debt system. The ruling magnates amongst the differ- 
ent railway-nets directors contract not only — progressively — new 
loans in order to enlarge their networks, i.e. the ‘territory’, where they 
rule as absolute monarchs, but they enlarge their respective networks 
in order to have new pretexts for engaging in new loans which enable them 
to pay the interest due to the holders of obligations, preferential 
shares, etc., and also from time to time to throw a sop to the much ill- 
used common shareholders in the shape of somewhat increased divi- 
dends. This pleasant method must one day or another terminate in 
an ugly catastrophe. 

In the United States the railway kings have become the butt of at- 
tacks, not only, as before this, on the part of the farmers and other in- 
dustrial ‘entrepreneurs’ of the West, but also on the part of the grand 
representative of commerce — the New York Chamber of Commerce. The 
octopodus railway king and financial swindler Gould has, on his side, 
told the New York commercial magnates: 

You now attack the railways, because you think them most vulnerable considering 
their present unpopularity; but take heed: after the railways every sort of corporation 
(means in the Yankee dialect joint stock company) will have its turn; then, later on, ail 
forms of associated capital; finally, all forms of capital; you are thus paving the way 
to — Communism whose tendencies are already more and more spreading among the 
people. 

M. Gould ‘a le flair bon’.* 

In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, is in store 
for the British government. What the English take from them an- 
nually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the Hin- 
doos, pensions for military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and 
other wars, etc. etc.— what they take from them without any equivalent 
and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually 
within India, speaking only of the value of the commodities the Indians 
have gratuitously and annually to send over to England, it amounts to 
more than the total sum of income of the 60 millions of agricultural and 
industrial labourers of India! This is a bleeding process, with a ven- 
geance! The famine years are pressing each other and in dimensions till 

* has a good nose 

now not yet suspected in Europe! There is an actual conspiracy going 
on wherein Hindus and Mussulmans cooperate; the British govern- 
ment is aware that something is ‘brewing’, but this shallow people 
(I mean the governmental men), stultified by their own parliamenta- 
ry ways of talking and thinking, do not even desire to see clear, to 
realize the whole extent of the imminent danger! To delude others 
and by deluding them to delude yourself—this is: parliamentary 
wisdom in a nutshell! Tant mieux!+ 

Can you tell me whether Prof. Lankester’s ‘Chapter on Deteriora- 
tion’ °? (I have seen it quoted in your article) is translated into Rus- 
sian? He is a friend of mine. 

Last month we had here Russian visitors, amongst others Prof. Sie- 
ber (now settled at Zurich) and Mr Kablukoff (Moscow). They were 
all day long studying at the British Museum. 

No news of our ‘mutual’ friend °? 

Apropos. Janson’s last statistical work*‘—comparing Russia 
with Europe—has made much sensation. I should be glad to 
see it. 93 

With best compliments 

Yours very truly, 
Karl Marx 

Should Lafargue’s article find no ‘home’ in Petersburg, be so kind 
as to return it to me. °4