London, 18 January 1883 

Dear Mr Bernstein, 

Days of festivity, followed by days of mourning, *°° constant ob- 
structions. At present I have scarcely a moment to call my own, as 
you will understand when I tell you that Marx is back here from 
Ventnor, *'! confined to the house with bronchitis —so far, luckily, 
only a mild attack — and forbidden to talk much, while all the family 
business devolves on me. (But not a word of all this in the paper *; 
Marx would be furious if he were to see the worthy Viereck’s indis- 
creet and, what’s more, not altogether veracious comments in today’s 
Siiddeutsche Post.) 

Enfin,* I still have an hour or so to spare for you. As for Gumbel, 
returned herewith, he resembles Heine’s Gumpelino* in as much as 
he too is interested in stocks and shares. For that matter, he’s an out- 
standing example of the German socialist abroad, having obviously 
been in Paris. Because we have provided these chaps with a theory of 
which they are entirely innocent, seldom bothering, moreover, to ac- 
quire a rudimentary —if indeed any— understanding of it, every 
provincial nincompoop among them considers himself superior to all 
other foreigners. Arriving from Heilbronn, or whatever the potty lit- 
tle place may be called, in London or Paris, he is appalled when he 
finds that his particular brand of provincialism does not hold good 
there. Instead of broadening his horizons and learning something, he 
deliberately makes himself more blinkered than before, for this serves 
to render all the more glaring the contrast between himself and the 
bad, stupid foreigners——i.e. his supposed superiority over them. Yet 
this is the kind of person who predominates in German associations 
abroad, and if you are now under pressure from them, just ask your- 
self who it was, after the promulgation of the Anti-Socialist Law, '° 
that sought to give undeserved prominence to these associations by 
means of centralisation, etc. If you had known the chaps then as well 

 Der Sozialdemokrat-» Well-° See Heine’s Reisebilder, 2nd part. 

as you do now, you would have been unlikely to go to so much 
trouble. 

‘The party with clean hands’ — meaning what? The hands, per- 
haps, of Hasselmann or Fritzsche and of so many others, about whom 
everyone arriving here as an exile or something of the kind had a tale 
to tell? 

Gumpelino is at his best when he comes to his stocks and shares. 
When some such provincial champion of moral virtue tilts thus phari- 
saically at practices, unpleasant enough in themselves, but from 
which the party none the less derives a real advantage that far out- 
weighs any possible damage, there must be a catch somewhere. The 
workers do not have stocks and shares, nor do they give a damn for 
the financial page. Hence — the little bourgeois, who also wants to 
dabble in stocks and shares, proceeds to demand that his party paper 
carry a benevolent, honest, moral, financial page. In the first place, it 
is not the business of a socialist paper to indicate how best the workers 
can be exploited —income from stocks and shares is, however, also 
the product of unpaid labour. If, then, in the second place Gumpe- 
lino nevertheless demands that the socialist press should do this, it 
says little for his socialism and even less for his flair as a business- 
man. I, too, have stocks and shares, buying and selling from time 
to time. But I am not so simple as to look to the socialist press 
for advice on these operations. Anyone who does so will burn his 
fingers, and serve him right! Get yourself baptised, Abraham Gum- 
pelino! 

We were delighted by the way Grillenberger and the Sozzaldemo- 
krat replied to Puttkamer’s piece of hypocrisy.! That’s the way to 
do it. Not to twist and turn beneath the opponent’s blows, or whine 
and whimper and stammer out excuses about no harm’s being meant, 
as is still done by so many. Hit back — that’s what one should do— 
for every blow dealt by the enemy, pay him back two or three. These 
have always been our tactics and up till now we have, I believe, al- 
ways pretty well got the better of our opponents. ‘Moreover, the 
genius of our soldiers lies in attacking, as is perfectly right,’ says old 
Fritz in his orders to his generals*°? and that, indeed, is what our 
workers do in Germany. But when, in the debate on exceptional laws 
generally, — given that [| ’s* abstract is right — Kayser, for instance, 
retracts whining that we are revolutionaries only in the Pickwick- 

* Louis Viereck (square in German = Viereck). 

ian sense,* what then? What he should have said was that neither 
the entire Reichstag nor the Federal Council would be sitting had it 
not been for a revolution; that old William, when he gobbled up three 
crowns and a free city, *9> was likewise a revolutionary; that legiti- 
macy itself, and the very foundations of the so-called constitution, 
are no more than the product of innumerable revolutions effected 
against the will of the people and directed against the people. Oh, 
this damned German slackness of thought and will, introduced at 
such pains into the party with the ‘eddicated’ men,——if only we 
could rid ourselves of it again! 

Time for the post. I shall reply as soon as possible to whatever 
points in your letter I may have overlooked. Thanks for the photo- 
graph. Proofs> when? 

Regards, yours, 
ELE.