London, 11 January 1890 

Dear Schliiter, 

Warmest thanks for your and your wife’s good wishes, most cordially 
reciprocated by all of us over here. I also received your letter of 1 July,>** 
shortly after that date, likewise the Commonwealth with Marx as a 
gigantic tree and, all round it, the inhabitants of the new communist 
Jerusalem. Also the article about G. Weerth, but unfortunate only No. 1 
and not the final part. 

Now as for Reid, I have sent your letter to Tussy and asked her to 
make inquiries from Champion (Labour Elector), but haven’t so far had 
an answer. The chaps over here are frightfully dilatory about anything 
with which they are not immediately concerned and are, besides, exceed- 
ingly busy; Tussy may have something to tell me tomorrow, in which 
case I’ll let you know by the next post. 

As regards the matter of John Burns’ trip to America, this would seem 
to me highly problematical; he cannot really leave this country without 
making way for his rivals and he also has to be present on the County 
Council,*! since he is the only labour representative there. 

The movement’s headlong progress last summer has slackened off a 
bit. And, best of all, the bourgeois rabble’s mindless sympathy for the 
labour movement as manifested during the dockers’ strike has also 
abated and is starting to give way to a far more natural feeling of mistrust 
and anxiety. During the gas strike in South London,°”” which the Gas 
Company forcibly imposed on the workers, the latter have again been 
left completely in the lurch by the philistines. This is excellent, and I 
only hope that some day Burns will himself meet with a similar experi- 
ence in a strike led by him, for in this respect he is subject to all manner 
of illusions. 

On top of that there is, as was only to be expected, all manner of fric- 
tion, e.g. between gas workers and dockers. But despite all this the 
masses are in spate and there’s no restraining them. The longer the tide 
is dammed back, the more violent the irruption will be when it comes. 
And these unskilled men are a very different proposition from the stick- 

lers of the old Trades Unions; not a trace of the old formalist spirit, of 
the narrow guild outlook of, say, the engineers;°* on the contrary, a 
general call for the organisation of all Trades Unions into one brother- 
hood and for an outright struggle with capital. During the dockers’ 
strike, for instance, there were three engineers at the commercial docks 
who kept the steam-engine going. Burns and Mann—both are engineers 
themselves and Burns is on the Executive of the Amalgamated 
Engineers Trades Union—were asked to induce the men to leave, for in 
that case the cranes would be unable to work and the Dock Co. be 
forced to give way. The three engineers refused, nor did the engineers’ 
Executive intervene—hence the long duration of the strike! Again, at 
the Silvertown Rubber Works—12 weeks’ strike*4?—the strike failed 
because of the engineers, who didn’t join in, even doing labourers’ work 
in contravention of their own union’s rules! And why? In order to ‘limit 
the supply of workers’, these idiots have a rule whereby only those who 
have served a proper apprenticeship are admitted to their UNION. In 
this way they have created a host of competitors known as black-legs, 
who are no less skilled than themselves and who would like to join the 
union but are forced to remain black-legs because kept out by this 
pedantic regulation, which today has become quite meaningless. And 
because they knew that, both in the commercial docks and in 
Silvertown, they would immediately have been replaced by the said 
black-legs, they remained where they were, thus themselves becoming 
black-legs vis-a-vis the strikers. Therein you may see the difference: 
The new unions stick together—during the present gas strike, the 
sailors and (steamers’) firemen, lightermen, coal carters, etc., are all 
standing shoulder to shoulder, but here again not the engineers, need- 
less to say; they just carry on working! 

However, the old Trades Unions, the big self-opinionated ones, will 
soon be cut down to size; their mainstay, the London Trades Council,>*” 
is gradually being worsted by the new unions and, in 2 or 3 years at the 
most, the Trades Union Congress”? will itself have been revolutionised. 
Even at the next one your Broadhursts are going to get the shock of their 
lives. 

The main thing about your revolution in the American socialist tea- 
cup is that you have killed off Rosenberg & Co.°°! As such, the 
German party over there has got to go; it is proving the worst obsta- 
cle. The American workers will come along all right but, just like the 
English, they will go their own way. You can’t drum theory into them 
before the event, but they will soon light upon it as a result of their 

own experience, their own blunders and the undesirable consequences 
thereof—and then it'll be all right. Independent peoples go their own 
way and the English and their offshoots are the most independent of 
all. Their insular, stubborn inflexibility may often be irritating but it 
also ensures that, once they have got going, they will finish what they 
have begun. 

I am pretty well and my eyesight has improved at last, but I’m not 
allowed to write for more than 3 hours a day (by daylight). Nim is also 
well. In the Rosher household, first Percy and then Pumps have fallen ill. 
Aveling has got influenza. In Kentish Town? things are going on much 
as usual to the inevitable accompaniment of tirades from Germany.— 
The Edes have settled down very well. So have the Fischers. 

Tell Sorge he’ll be getting a letter one of these days but, having waited 
for so long, you were first on the list. Cordial regards to your wife and 
self from Nim and 

Your 
F. Engels