London, 26 November 1859 
9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, 
Haverstock Hill 

Dear Engels, 

On Monday I sent you a long letter about the wrangles down 
here. On Tuesday I sent you the Gartenlaube* and Beta’s article.°” 
Well, every day I’ve been waiting to hear from you since, in arrairs of 
this kind, it is only your letters that revive my wife’s proopine spirits. One 
can simply laugh off such rubbish if the rest of one’s life is tolerable. 
But in MY CIRCUMSTANCES THEY WEIGH HEAVILY UPON THE FAMILY. 

Well, today I’m sending you: 

1. A letter from Lassalle to myself.°’? The ‘statement’ I sent the 
Volks-Zeitung is the same as appeared in No. 325 of the Augsburg 
Allgemeine Zeitung.” (Another, two columns long, about my attitude 
to vulgar democracy, etc., appeared in No. 139 of the Hamburg 
Reform.“ 1 took the opportunity of naming you as the author of Po 
and Rhine, a fact obstinately kept dark by that same vulgar 
democracy.) From Lassalle’s letter you will see that he, who in point 
OF FACT was piping the same tune as Vogt, would much rather the 
Berlin public did not know about my opposition to Vogt and his 
propaganda. 

From the same letter you will see that he at last intends to set to 
work on his ‘Political Economy’? but is clever enough to wait 
another 3 months until he is in possession of my second 
instalment.*” The motives for the consistent failure, even on the 
part of one who is ‘friendly’, to break the conspiration de silence are 
now plain. 

I have taken the opportunity of giving Lassalle a brief outline of 
my views on the Italian question, at the same time telling him 
that, should anyone wish at such a critical moment to speak in the 
name of the party, the following alternatives must hold good. 
Either he consults the others beforehand, or the others (euphemis- 

a ‘Ferdinand Freiligrath’, Die Gartenlaube, No. 43, 1859. - > K. Marx, ‘Declaration’. - 
¢ K. Marx, ‘Statement to the Editors of Die Reform, the Volks-Zeitung and the 
Aligemeine Zeitung’.- 9 See this volume, pp. 536-39. 

tic for you and me) have the right to put their own view before 
the public, without regard for that anyone. 

2. A letter from Liebknecht to Freiligrath. You will have seen 
from the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung that Freiligrath declared, 
firstly, that he had been made out to be Vogt’s accuser ‘without his 
knowledge and consent’; secondly, that ‘he had never written a 
line for the Volk’ (doesn’t write at all).* Mr Kolb, who had wrongly 
construed a private letter from Liebknecht to himself and had 
been told off by Cotta after this statement of Freiligrath’s, 
naturally sacrificed Liebknecht as a scapegoat. 1! But Freiligrath, 
who is a subaltern of Fazy’s, was outraged and wrote an 
exceedingly rude letter to Liebknecht.” I enclose Liebknecht’s reply 
to it.© 

Now Freiligrath’s letter to Liebknecht contained the following 
passage: 

‘I possess only one letter from Vogt, dated 1 April 1859.°8 This letter, as Marx 

only last Saturday conceded’ (I UNDERLINE), ‘does not contain a single syllable that might 
be used to substantiate a charge against Vogt. Why on earth, then, should I be trying 
to prove him guilty of attempted bribery?” 

Now although on the one hand Freiligrath is indispensable to me 
for drawing bills on New York, although on the other I wish for 
political reasons to avoid a breach with him, and, lastly, am fond 
of him personally wit az u1s Fautts, I could not do otherwise—it 
was absolutely essential—than send him a formal protest about the 
above lines. For who is to guarantee that he will not write the 
same thing to Vogt and that the latter will not have it published? 

The matter he misrepresents was as follows: 

During my meeting with him, at, which the topic was Blind, not 
Vogt,‘ I told him (there was no question of a debate, and still Jess of 
his calling me to account, as might be inferred from the words 
‘Marx conceded’) that he himself had considered Blind to be the 
author of the pamphlet, the latter having told him what he had 
told me; also that, before my meeting with Blind on 9th May,” I 
had known nothing at all about Vogt’s activities, save his letter to 
Freiligrath from which—as he, Freiligrath, would recall—I did not 
infer bribery, but rather found therein the same old, all too 
familiar, superficially liberal pot-house politics of his. This is, after 
all, not at all the same thing as ‘conceding that the letter did not 

a F. Freiligrath, ‘Erklarung’, Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 319 (supplement), 15 November 
1859. - b on 21 November 1859 - ¢ Liebknecht replied on 23 November. - 4 See this 
volume, p. 533. -€ Zur Warmnung 

contain a single line that might be used to substantiate a charge’. I 
pointed this out to him, at the same time expressing my 
astonishment at his failure to call Blind to account for having, in 
The Free Press,’ treated similar letters (including Freiligrath’s) as 
corpora delicti.” So far I have had no answer from him, although he 
usually replies at once. It is possible—and this would be 
disastrous—that he has taken this opportunity to sever old party 
ties which, or so it would seem, have long become irksome to him. 
However THAT May BE, I was bound to protest against his account of 
the affair. 

Enough of this rubbish. 

Yesterday a Tory journalist told me it was his intention to 
provide evidence next week in a Tory weexty (the Weerxry Man, I 
THINK) to the effect that Garibaldi was receiving money from 
Bonaparte while still a merchant in South America. Nous verrons.“ 

Regards to Lupus. 

Your 
K. M. 

Apropos. In my article in the Tribune* yesterday I said that I 
would shortly be writing about the Ririe Movement over here. So I 
should be glad if you would write about it.°?