{Draft} 

[London, beginning of April 1891] 

Dear Bebel, 

I shall not get round today to answering your letter of the 30th — 
that will be done shortly * as soon as the present mass of work allows 
me a free moment; instead I wish to send you and your wife? my 
heartiest congratulations on your silver wedding. I trust that the two 
of you will still be there to celebrate your golden wedding on 6 April 
1916 and, come that day, will drain a glass in memory of the old boy 
now writing these words, who by then will have long since gone up in 
smoke and ashes. 

One thing I can tell you: there are few people alive today whom 
I could congratulate with the same sincerity and warmth on the occa- 

* See this volume, pp. 175-84.-> Julie Bebel 

sion of such an anniversary. Ever since we started corresponding and 
subsequently struck up a personal acquaintanceship, ?°* I have no- 
ticed time and again how our lines and mode of thought have coin- 
cided to an extent that is literally miraculous between people whose 
processes of development have been so different. That—I’m glad to 
say — doesn’t preclude our failure to agree on many points. But these 
again are points where in course of time agreement is automatically 
reached as a result of discussion or of new events, or else where such 
agreement eventually ceases to signify. And so I hope it will always 
remain. I don’t believe that a case will ever again arise in which one 
of us had to take a step immediately affecting the other without first 
having consulted him.*?°* And I, for one, still bless the day when 
you entered into regular correspondence with me.