London, | January 1895 
41 Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

Dear Schliiter, 

Your letter of 11 August still remains unanswered, nor have I yet thanked 
you for the Census Compendium* which arrived safely. I have, however, 
been overwhelmed with all manner of work, while urgent party 

“ Department of the Interior. Census Office. Compendium of the Eleventh Census: 1890. 

and business correspondence has virtually precluded my attending to my 
private correspondence, something from which Sorge has also had to suffer. 
You will have heard from him that Louise Kautsky is now Mrs Freyberger 
and the mother of a strong and healthy little girl and that we have all moved 
to 41, Regent’s Park Road. 

As Sorge will have told you, I have sent you a copy of Volume II I of 
Capital addressed to the Volkszeitung, as I didn’t know whether your 
Hoboken address still held good. At all events the Volkszeitung seemed safer 
to me. I could not, however, pass on your commission to Ede, he having long 
since been engaged for the same purpose by the Neue Zeit. *’ | ought really 
to have advised you of this—please accept my apologies. 

Over here things are much the same as with you. Amongst the masses the 
socialist instinct is becoming ever stronger, but whenever it behoves them to 
translate their instinctive impulses into clear ideas and demands, the chaps at 
once go their several ways, some to the Social Democratic Federation, “* 
others to the Independent Labor Party, ''* while the rest stay put in the 
Independent Labour Party, Trades Unions Organization etc., etc. In short, not 
a party but so many sects. The leaders are nearly all of them pretty unreliable 
fellows, while the candidates for the supreme leadership, though thick on the 
ground, are by no means eminently fitted for the post. At the same time we 
have the two big bourgeois parties who are standing by, purse in hand, to see 
whom they can buy. Moreover, what is known as ‘democracy’ over here is 
much restricted by indirect barriers. Periodicals are shockingly expensive, 
ditto candidatures for Parliament, ditto life as a Member of Parliament—if 
only on account of the vast correspondence this entails. To revise the 
deplorably kept registers of electors also costs a great deal of money and 
hitherto none but the two official parties have been able to defray that cost. 
Hence it is unlikely that anyone who does not support either of those parties 
will appear on the register. People over here are far behind the Continent in 
all these matters and, what’s more, they are beginning to notice it; again, 
there is no second ballot, a relative majority or, as you Americans would say, 
PLURALITY, being enough. It is a situation in which everything is organised 
on the basis of only two parties and, until a third party is strong enough to be 
a match for them, the most it will be able to do is turn the scales. In the same 
way there is little likelihood of the Trades Unions over here bringing off 
something on the lines of the Berlin beer boycott ““—a court of arbitration 
such as was secured over 

there is something that is still unattainable in this country. 

On the other hand—as in the case of America—once the workers over 
here know what they want, the state, the land, industry and everything else 
will be theirs. 

This is intended for you alone, not for the Volkszeitung. Louise sends her 
kindest regards and both of us wish you a very Happy New Year. 
Yours, 
F. Engels