ENGELS TO FLORENCE KELLEY-WISCHNEWETZKY” 

London, 2 May 1888 

Dear Mrs Wischnewetzky, 

By this mail I send you registered the ms.? that is to say the copy Mrs 
Aveling made of it when she found that with your close handwriting and 
absence of margin it was impossible to insert in pencil legibly the 
suggested alterations. There were many, arising from the fact that you 
translated from a German translation and we had the original to work 
upon. Many alterations have therefore no other purpose than to bring 
the English text nearer to the French original. In others, I have for the 
sake of clearness taken more liberties. 

The preface is nearly done in the rough, but as you will require a 
German translation, I shall have to keep it a little longer on that account. 

2K. Marx, Speech on the Question of Free Trade —” F. Engels, ‘Protection and 
Free Trade. Preface to the Pamphlet: Karl Marx, Speech on the Question of Free 
Trade’ 

Anyhow I will hurry on as much as the two hours a day will allow 
me to do—my doctor has again last week bound me strictly to that 
limit. 

Will you please tell Sorge that according to present arrangements the 
Sozialdemokrat! is going to be removed to London. But it will be well 
to keep this quiet for the present, when our friends intend this to be 
talked about and to get into the news-hunting press, they will no doubt 
arrange that themselves. 

I am boycotted here almost as much as you are in New York—the 
various socialist cliques here are dissatisfied at my absolute neutrality 
with regard to them, and being all of them agreed as to that point, try to 
pay me out by not mentioning any of my writings. Neither Our Corner 
(Mrs Beasant) nor To-day nor the Christian Socialist (of this latter 
monthly, however, I am not quite certain) have mentioned the Condition 
of the Working-Class though I sent them copies myself. I fully expected 
this but did not like to say so to you until the proof was there. I don’t 
blame them, because I have seriously offended them by saying that so far 
there is no real working-class movement here,* and that, as soon as that 
comes, all the great men and women who now make themselves busy as 
officers of an army without soldiers, will soon find their level, and a 
rather lower one than they expect. But if they think their needle pinks 
can pierce my old well-tanned and pachydermatous skin, they are 
mistaken. 

Yours very truly, 
F. Engels