ENGELS TO FLORENCE KELLEY-WISCHNEWETZKY”° 

London, 7 May 1887 

Dear Mrs Wischnewetzky, 

I have received your note of April 25 with thanks but no preface; if I 
receive it per next steamer on Monday I shall send you word at once. In 
the meantime as I received no copy of the book? as yet, will you please 
see that I get at least something to work upon, a proof-sheet or whatever 
it is, as the Volkszeitung translation’? cannot pass under any circum- 
stances, I shall work at the translation as fast as my inflamed eye will 
allow. I am only sorry you did not send the ms. or a proof as soon as the 
idea of a separate German edition occurred to you.'!! 

Sorge writes to me: 

‘Wischnewetzky’s bedauern sehr, durch die Verheimlichungen und 
Unterschlagungen der Executive zur Absendung des bekannten Briefs 
an Dich veranlasst worden zu sein, und haben sich alle erdankliche 
Mihe gegeben, Aveling in der New Yorker Sektion Gerechtigkeit zu 
verschaffen,’>!!2 

If this, as I must suppose, was written with your consent, then I am 
perfectly satisfied, and have no desire whatever to return to that subject 
in a spirit of controversy. 

Nobody was more rejoiced than I when I learnt that the book was 
finally out of the hand of that despicable Executive and of the Socialist 
Labor Party generally. Forty years’ experience have shown me how 
useless and literally thrown away are all these publications, by small 
cliques, that by their very mode of publication are excluded from the 
general book-market, and thereby from literary cognizance. It was the 

*The American edition of Engels’ The Condition of the Working-Class in 
England ~» ‘The Wischnewetzkys regret very much having been induced—by 
the Executive’s suppression of facts and misappropriation of funds—to send you 
the notorious letter and have been making every effort to secure justice for 
Aveling in the New York section.’ 

same thing even with the party publications in Germany up to 1878; and 
only since the Sozialistengesetz*** which forced our people to organize 
a book trade of their own. in opposition both to the government and to 
the officially organized Leipzig book-trade, has this been overcome. 
And IJ do not see why in America where the movement begins with such 
gigantic and imposing force, the same mistakes, with the same draw- 
backs in their wake, should be quite unnecessarily gone through over 
again. The whole Socialist, and, in England, Chartist literature has 
thereby been made so extinct that even the British Museum cannot now 
procure copies at any price! 
I remain, dear Mrs Wischnewetzky, 

very sincerely yours 
F. Engels