Helensburgh, Scotland, 14 September 1891 

Dear Sorge, 

I’m up here on a lightning tour ?°* with Pumps and Louise Kaut- 
sky; the past week has been spent either in the Highlands or on the 
water and it has done me a power of good. We shall be home a week 
from now. 

There’s nothing one can do about the Schliiters. He can’t help 
chasing after this petticoat or that and she* can’t help burying the 
hatchet and forgiving him the moment she feels she has taken things 
as far as she dares. But if this time she nevertheless remains in Germa- 
ny — which I’m inclined to doubt—, it will be because people there 
have talked her into it. 

Mr Ferdinand Gilles, a scoundrelly man of letters, who was made 
to come over to us from the Party of Progress,? though we in Ger- 
many didn’t want him, has joined forces in London with Hyndman 
& Co. and actually has a party all of his own in the Communist So- 
ciety.*° The man has been denounced to us as a police spy by a reli- 
able source whose identity, however, cannot be divulged, which also 
explains his otherwise inexplicable source of funds (he contributes £6 
a year to a school founded over here by Louise Michel). At the Brus- 
sels Congress '*> the fellow tried to gain currency among the Ger- 
mans for the lies about Aveling being disseminated on the sly by 
Hyndman, Mother Besant, her lover Herbert Burrows and others to 
the effect that when Aveling married Tussy he had abandoned a wife 
and three children in a state of utter destitution and that his father- 
in-law was intent on beating his brains out. (Well, Aveling and his 
wife parted by mutual consent 8 years ago, she took back her fortune 
which brings her in over £ 500 a year, there were never any children 
and her father had died long before.) Since this fell flat, he sought to 
find a receptacle for these lies among the correspondents of the bour- 
geois newspapers and that, of course, proved successful. The entire press 

* Anna Schliter 

was full of it. In Brussels Aveling could do nothing for fear of giving 
the Belgian police an excuse to disrupt the Congress. But when he re- 
turned to London and placed the whole matter before us, we unani- 
mously fell in with his view that Gilles must be given a thrashing. 
After an attempt to do so in the German Society had been frustrated, 
Aveling, accompanied by Louise Kautsky as witness (lest he should 
falsely maintain that he had been floored by two men), proceeded to 
his house last Tuesday, the 8th, and gave him two hearty punches 
in the face. No doubt that will have a somewhat more salutary 
effect. Whether anything further came of the business I don’t 
know, as we left the same day and have been unable to receive 
any news. 

Aveling at once advised Liebknecht of the facts of the case for pub- 
lication in the Vorwdrts*?°7 and so the affair will no doubt also be dis- 
cussed in America. 

Of the American delegates, those I saw were Mac Vey and 
Abraham Cahan, the apostle of the Jews; both of them pleased me 
much. 

The Congress has proved a brilliant success for us arrer aLL-— the 
Broussists ? stayed right away while Hyndman’s chaps withdrew their 
opposition. And, best ofall, the anarchists have been shown the door, 
just as they were at the Hague Congress.?9* The new, incomparably 
larger and avowedly Marxist International is beginning again at the 
precise spot where its predecessor left off. 

The Traprs Union Congress in Newcastle has also been a great vic- 
tory.2°8 The old Unions with the textile workers at their head, to- 
gether with the entire reactionary party that exists among the work- 
ers, had mustered all their forces in order to overturn the eight hours 
resolution of 1890. They failed, having secured no more than one in- 
significant, fleeting concession. That is crucial. There is still much 
confusion, but there’s no stopping things now and the bourgeois pa- 
pers fully recognise the defeat of the bourgeois labour party, recognise it 
with dismay and a wailing and gnashing of teeth. The Scottish libe- 
rals in particular, the most intelligent and most classical bourgeois in 

* E. Aveling, ‘In der Rheinisch-Westfalischen Zeitung vom 22. Aug. findet sich cin Ar- 
tikel...’ and ‘Der Urheber der tiber mich in der Deutschen Presse...’, Vorwdris, Nos. 211 
and 212; 10 and 11 September 1891; see also this volume, pp. 248, 251, 252-53. 

the Empire, are unanimous in their lamentations over this great mis- 
fortune and the incorrigible perversity of the working man. 
Warm regards to you and your wife.’ 

Your 
F.E.