Karl Marx

The "President of Humanity"

Rheinische Zeitung.
No. 102, 12 April 1865

The "President of Humanity".

On my return from Holland to London, the Social-Demokrat in No. 39 presented me with an asafoetida cake baked by Herr Bernh. Becker’s own hand, largely made up of Vogt’s slander crumbs. The judicially documented refutation of Vogt’s fairy-tale lies is to be found in my work *Herr Vogt. London, 1860*. Quite contrary to his habit, however, Herr Bernhard Becker, the “President of Humanity”, does not content himself on this occasion with mere copying. For the first time in his life he attempts to present something of his own.

“Yes, Marx,” says the “President of Humanity”, “pawned through Dronke for 1,000 thalers a manuscript which the Prussian Police Commissioner Stieber, who was spying among the refugees in London, redeemed.” And three times in the course of his self-delivered presidential address our Bernhard Becker returns to this “fact” with ever-increasing glee.

On page 124 of my *Herr Vogt*, I say in a note: “I myself had become acquainted with Bangya and his then friend, the present General Tün, in London in 1850. The suspicion which his dealings with all sorts of parties—Orleanists, Bonapartists, etc.—and his association with policemen of every nationality aroused in me, he simply brushed aside by showing me a patent issued to him by Kossuth in his own hand, by which he had already been appointed provisional police president in Komorn under Klapka and later police president *in partibus*. As secret police chief in the service of the revolution, he naturally had to keep the approaches to the police in the service of the governments ‘open’. In the course of the summer of 1852 I discovered that he had embezzled a manuscript which I had entrusted to him to deliver to a bookseller in Berlin and had played it into the hands of a German government. After I had written about this incident and other peculiarities of the man which had long struck me to a Hungarian (Szemere) in Paris, and the Bangya mystery had been completely solved through the intervention of a third, well-informed person, I sent a public denunciation, signed with my name, to the Newyorker Criminalzeitung at the beginning of 1853.”

The “President of Humanity” has obviously not read the detailed denunciation of Bangya, who was still living in London at the time, published by me 12 years ago in the Newyorker Criminalzeitung. Otherwise he would probably have kept his fiction somewhat closer to the facts. As it is, he surrenders himself entirely to the play of his sweet fancy, and what was more obvious than the pleasant association of ideas of London and pawning? But I warrant that Bernhard Becker has never pawned his manuscripts.

The “President of Humanity” further deigned to add:
“that when the Vienna *Botschafter*, the semi-official organ of the Austrian government, was founded, Marx tried to win me (the self-same Bernhard Becker) as a correspondent for it, concealing from me the semi-official character of the emerging paper which, as he said, had been sent to him, and on the contrary emphasising that I might contribute quite red articles to it.”

Herr Bernhard Becker, who at that time was not yet “President of Humanity” and who also had the inviolable habit of scribbling “quite pale articles” for the Londoner *Hermann*, surprised me (I had only seen him once or twice before by chance) — shortly before he quietly stole away from London for reasons of safety — one fine evening with a visit in person to my house. He whined pitifully to me about his misfortune and asked whether I could procure him correspondences to help him out of bitter need. I replied that a few days earlier Herr Kolatschek had informed Herr S. Borkheim, political refugee and merchant in the City, of the founding of a new, allegedly “very liberal” Viennese paper, had sent him specimen copies and requested him to recruit a London correspondent. At Bernhard Becker’s ardent wish I promised to approach Herr Borkheim, who is always glad to oblige refugees, on his behalf in this matter. Bernhard Becker also wrote, as far as I remember, one or more trial articles to Vienna. And his abortive attempt to become a correspondent of the *Botschafter* proves my alliance with the Austrian Chancellery! Herr Bernhard Becker evidently believes that because Countess Hatzfeldt gave him an office, the Good Lord also gave him the brains needed for it!

“Systematically,” Bernhard Becker continues, “Liebknecht now worked on Countess Hatzfeldt, to whom Marx also sends telegrams and letters, to stir her up against the Association.”

Herr Bernhard Becker fancies that I take the importance that has devolved upon him by testament quite as “systematically” seriously as he does himself! My letters to Countess Hatzfeldt after Lassalle’s death consisted of a letter of condolence, replies to various questions put to me concerning the intended Lassalle brochure, and discussions of a defence against a slanderer of Lassalle which was requested of me and which actually took place. To avoid misunderstandings, however, I deemed it expedient to remind the Countess in a letter of 22 December 1864 that I did not agree with Lassalle’s politics. With that our correspondence ended, in which not a syllable concerned the Association. The Countess had, among other things, asked me to write to her by return whether the addition of certain portraits to the intended brochure seemed suitable to me. I replied by telegraph: No! This one telegram Herr Bernhard Becker, who is as great a grammarian as he is a poet and thinker, puts into the plural.

He relates that I also later took part in an agitation set on foot against him. The sole step on my part in this all-important matter was this: I had been written to from Berlin that Bernhard Becker was being persecuted from a certain quarter because he would not allow the *Social-Demokrat* and the “Association” to be misused for agitation for the incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein into Prussia. I had at the same time been requested to communicate this “intrigue” as a warning to Herr Klings in Solingen, upon whom, owing to an earlier connection, a certain influence was attributed to me, and to Herr Philipp Becker in Geneva. I did both, the one through a friend in Barmen, the other through my friend Schily in Paris, who, like myself, was biased by the delusion that something human had happened to the “President of Humanity” and that he had really once behaved decently. He now naturally twists the facts into their outright opposite — as a dialectician.

But the “President of Humanity” is not only great as a poet, thinker, grammarian and dialectician. He is, into the bargain, a pathologist of the purest water. My carbuncle affliction, which lasted a year and a half and incidentally continued for another six months after Lassalle’s death, this blood-red illness he explains from “pale envy at Lassalle’s greatness”. But, he adds emphatically, “he did not dare to come out against Lassalle, for he knew full well that the latter would have beaten him dead as a door-nail with his giant club, just like Bastiat-Schulze”.

Now it is precisely in this last work of his on “Bastiat-Schulze” that Lassalle praises my *Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie. Berlin 1859* beyond measure, calling it “epoch-making”, a “masterpiece”, and placing it on a par with the works of Adam Smith and Ricardo. From this Herr Bernhard Becker, with his peculiar thinking capacity, concludes that Lassalle could have killed me like Schulze-Bastiat. Incidentally, Lassalle also had quite different notions of what I “dare”. When I wrote to him on an occasion not to be discussed here that Engels and I would, for reasons I enumerated, be compelled to make a public attack on him, he replied at length in a letter lying before me at this moment, in which he first sets out his counter-arguments and then concludes with the turn of phrase: “Consider all this before you speak out loud and in public. The division and splitting of our not very large, special party would, moreover, be a deplorable event!”

Herr Bernhard Becker finds a complete contradiction in the fact that I wanted nothing to do with an international hole-and-corner association in which he, Bernhard Becker, is supposed to have figured, while I am participating with great zeal in the international association founded last September by the leaders of the London Trades Unions.

Herr Bernhard Becker’s power of distinction is evidently a match for his power of inference. His association, he boasts, blossomed into a full “400 men”, whereas our association is so immodest as to number, already now, ten thousand members in England alone. It is indeed impermissible for something of this sort to happen, so to speak, behind the back of the “President of Humanity”.

All things considered, especially the swarm of abilities of Herr Bernhard Becker which I have only very briefly indicated, one hardly finds justified his complaint that too much was to be laid upon a man like him all at once; that not only was autocracy-dealing foisted upon him as his main subject, but “on the side” also the minor office: “to buy eggs and butter for the house.” Yet a better housekeeping arrangement seems possible among his dual functions. In future let his main business be “to buy eggs and butter for the house” and let him only quite “incidentally” preside over humanity.

London, 8 April 1865.
Karl Marx.

Correction.
To the Editor of the “Weißen Adlers”

Correction.

After the two motions by Messrs Beales and Leverson mentioned in No. 30 of your paper had been adopted at the London Polish meeting of 1st March, Herr Peter Fox (Englishman) moved, on behalf of the “International Working Men’s Association”, “That an integral and independent Poland is an indispensable condition of a democratic Europe, and that so long as this condition remains unfulfilled, revolutionary triumphs on the Continent can only be short-lived preludes to prolonged periods of counter-revolutionary rule.”

After a brief historical sketch of the evils which befell Europe in consequence of the loss of Poland’s freedom and of Russia’s policy of conquest, Herr P. Fox pointed out that the attitude of the liberal party on this question did not coincide with that of the democratic society on whose behalf he spoke. The motto of conservative Europe was: An enslaved Europe with an enslaved Poland as its basis. The motto of the “International Working Men’s Association”, on the other hand, was: A free Europe based on a free and independent Poland.

Herr Eccarius (German worker, Vice-President of the “International Working Men’s Association”) seconded the motion and set forth in detail Prussia’s participation in the various partitions of Poland. He concluded with the words: “The downfall of the Prussian monarchy is the *conditio sine qua non* for Germany’s restoration and Poland’s restoration.”

Mr Le Lubez, French member of the “International Working Men’s Association”, also spoke in favour of the motion, which was carried unanimously and amid sustained applause from the meeting.

The Daily News and a few other “liberal” London daily papers suppressed this part of the report out of vexation at the triumph of the “International Working Men’s Association”, without whose co-operation, incidentally, the Polish meeting in St. Martin’s Hall would not have taken place at all. I request you, in the name of the “International Working Men’s Association”, to insert this correction.

London, etc.
H. Jung, corresponding secretary
of the “Int. Working Men’s Ass.” for Switzerland.