London, 5 March 1892 

Dear Sorge, 

Have received your letters of 15, 22 and 29 January and postcards 
of 2, 4 and 13 February. Also the newspapers re Anna.° The latter has 
evidently succumbed to that fashionable complaint, megalomania. 
It’s strange; these sort of people, the Hartmanns e¢ al, are fit for one 

@ William II-° See next letter.-° Stanistaw Padlewski 

deed — coop, BAD oR INDIFFERENT — and, once that’s done, are good for 
nowt else,* as Schorlemmer would say. 

Though I haven’t alas had time to read your last article in the Neue 
Xeit,” I must get round to doing so since it’s only with your help that 
I can follow developments in America without going astray. 

I am terribly overburdened with all kinds of tasks and tiresome 
odds and ends. You ought to see the mass of German, French, Italian, 
Spanish, Polish, Russian, Danish, American, English and, now and 
again, Romanian newspapers I get and must at any rate glance at if 
I am to keep au courant with the movement. Not to mention genuine 
tasks which swallow up the rest of my time. And the correspondence! 
I’ve got backlog enough to last me a week. And then I’m supposed to 
complete Volume III.‘ It’s appalling. But it will be managed some- 
how. Only you people must be patient if I sometimes allow my corres- 
pondence to lapse. 

In France things are going very well. Lafargue is using his expense 
allowance and his free railway pass to travel all over the place, from 
Lille to Toulouse, agitating and this with brilliant success. All the 
other socialist factions have been pushed into the background by ours 
and even in Paris the Possibilists ? are continuing to beat a retreat, 
thanks to their internal squabbles and to vigorous action on the part 
of our own people. They again have in mind a daily journal as party 
organ, and this would now stand a better chance.*?° It’s capital that 
Constans should have been sacked from the Ministry of the Interior; 
the chap was determined to provoke fusillades, by violence, and we 
can do without them. Since our May Day demonstration coincides 
with the municipal elections throughout France,*? shooting is a lux- 
ury no minister could permit himself unless, like Constans, he was 
banking on a nine days’ wonder. 

Here the bickering continues as before, but nevertheless the cause is 
making headway in true Anglo-Saxon fashion, slowly but surely. 
Everything always subsides into small individual battles which can- 
not be assessed until actually resolved. At the moment these concern 
the May Day celebrations. On the one side our people, on the other, 
in opposition to us, the Trapes Counci. !9° (the stuffier TRranes Unions) 
and the Social Democratic Federation 7°; the two enemies of yesteryear 
have been forced to club together against us, which is in itself a vic- 

* In the original: nix mehr ze wolle (South -German dialect) -? F.A. Sorge, ‘Das Pro- 
gramm der Geldreformer in den Vereinigten Staaten’.-*° of Capital 

tory. We are in possession of Hyde Park and possession Is NINE POINTS OF 
THE LAW. How things will turn out remains to be seen. On our side we 
shall probably have the casworkers,! a number of the smaller un- 
ions and the rapicat class *°° (almost wholly working class) — what 
happens next must remain to be seen. 

And now for Germany. Things are going so swimmingly there that 
we couldn’t wish for anything better, although we shall no doubt ex- 
perience some pretty hard knocks in the near future. From the outset 
Little Willie* has been a prime example of a ‘last of the line’ with 
a singular aptitude for ruining the dynasty and monarchy. But now 
his madness has taken on an acute form and his megalomania is such 
that he can neither sleep nor hold his tongue. As luck would have it, 
the regis voluntas which, at the drop of a hat, would become suprema 
lex,*'% is directed against us one day and the Liberals the next, and 
now he has actually discovered that it’s the Liberals, whose progeny 
we are, that are the source of all evil— he’s been taught as much by 
his clerical friends. And now he’s prosecuting the Kélnische Zeitung for 
lése-majesté *? and will not rest content until he has hounded your 
tame German philistine into the opposition. What more could we 
ask? A month ago, when Stumm’s speech was heard in the Reichs- 
tag,*?! it was still possible to envisage the re-introduction of the Anti- 
Socialist Law but that is no longer the case, for William is more in- 
censed by the opposition of the bourgeoisie to his bill for the clericali- 
sation of primary schools *?! than by all the Social-Democrats put to- 
gether, and would sooner leave us alone than make any concessions to 
the other fellows. In both chambers it is, in fact, from the bourgeois 
parties that he encounters most opposition, not from our 35 members 
in the Reichstag; in the Prussian chamber we have no seats at all. 
Nevertheless, we, too, may run into some heavy weather — yet what 
could be better than for the Crown to place itself in an impossible po- 
sition vis-a-vis the middle classes and the workers at one and the same 
time? The ministers are all second-rate or third-rate men, Caprivi is 
a staunch lout but unequal to his task, nor does Miquel grow any the 
wiser for his perpetual cheese-paring. In short, at this rate a crisis 
may be in the offing. In Prussia and in the Prusso-German Empire 
people cannot as in Bavaria afford to go on for years putting up with 
a demented monarch” and I shouldn’t be surprised if, some time 
soon, they didn’t erect a special madhouse for Little Willie. And then 
there’d be a Regency, which is exactly what we’ve been needing. 

* William I1-° Ludwig I] 

As regards Russia and Ja haute politique,* I have nothing to add to 
my article” in the Neue Zeit. 

Warm regards from Aveling, who happens to be here just now — 
Tussy is off agitating in Plymouth. Louise will enclose a short note. 
Warm regards to your wife,° and look after yourselves. 

Your 
F.E.