MARX TO FERDINAND FREILIGRATH”! 

Manchester, 23 February 1860* 
6 Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road 

Dear Freiligrath, 

I am writing to you again and, indeed, for the last time, about 
the Vogt affair. You have not so much as acknowledged receipt of 
my first two communications,” a courtesy you would have 
extended to any philistine. I cannot possibly surmise that you 
imagine I am trying to extort a letter from you for any public 
purpose. As you are aware, I possess at least 200 letters of yours, 
in which there is more than enough material to establish your 
relations with me and with the party, should it prove necessary. 

I am writing to you because, as a poet and a man up to his eyes 
in business, you would seem to misconceive the significance of the 
lawsuits I am conducting in Berlin and London.” They are crucial 
to the historical vindication of the party and its subsequent position 
in Germany; this applies all the more to the lawsuit in Berlin in 
that it is taking place at the same time as the Eichhoff-Stieber 
case,** which turns mainly on the Cologne communist trial.’ 

The crrevances you may perhaps be nourishing against me are 
the following: 

1. That I abused your name (or so you told Faucher). 

2. The kind of ‘scene’ I made you in your orrice. 

@ 1850 in the original. - > See this volume, pp. 30-32. 

Re 1. I personally have never mentioned your name, except for 
saying in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung that Blind had told you 
much the same as he told me.* This is a racr. From the first I 
realised how important it was to call attention to the real origins of 
the pamphlet,” and I had the right to cite a witness in connection 
with what Blind had said. 

As for Liebknecht’s letter to the editor of the A. A. Z., in which 
he mentions your name and mine (with reference to Blind), he 
will, if necessary, confirm on oath that this was done without my 
knowledge, just as he sent the Augsb. Allg. Zeit. the pamphlet ‘Zur 
Warnung’ without my knowledge and during my absence in Manchester. 
When Vogt sued the A. A. Z. and the latter turned to him 
(Liebknecht], he was still in doubt as to whether or not I should 
disavow him, as I could have done, and was in fact surprised when 
I immediately said I would do all I could to help him. 

If—in the letter I wrote you‘—I took his side in the matter of 
your letter to him, this was simply because it seemed ungenerous, 
in a man of your repute and social standing, to write so harshly to 
an obscure party member living in a garret and one with whom 
you had hitherto been on friendly terms. 

As regards the irritable tone of my own letter, there were 
various reasons for that. 

Firstly, I was deeply wounded by the fact that you seemed more 
inclined to believe Blind than myself. 

Secondly, from a letter you wrote me in a very irritable vein 
regarding The Morning Advertiser (Schiller Festival article“) you 
would seem to consider me capable of the enormity, not only of 
surreptitiously introducing into Blind’s article something injurious 
to yourself, but of actually denouncing this to you as Blind’s 
handiwork.”* I was at a complete loss to imagine what I could have 
done to deserve such injurious suspicions. 

Thirdly, you showed Blind a private letter I had written you. 

Finally, I had the right to expect—and all the more so after the 
‘Gartenlaube’ article,’ that you should include in your statement in 
the A. A. Z.° some allusion, however faint, that would obviate any 
appearance of its being a personal breach with myself and a public 

a K. Marx, ‘Declaration’, 15 November 1859. - © Zur Warnung - < on 23 November 
1859 (present edition, Vol. 40) - 4 [K. Blind,] ‘Crystal Palace—The Schiller 
Commemoration’, The Morning Advertiser, No. 21344, 11 November 1859. - 
e F. Freiligrath. ‘Erklarung’, Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 319 (supplement), 15 November 
1859. 

repudiation of the party. The fact that your second statement’ 
actually appeared alongside Blind’s” and your name served as a 
screen for his lying and fraudulence could hardly be expected to 
delight me. Incidentally, I give you my word of honour that, prior to 
their publication, I had no knowledge whatsoever of any of the 
statements made by Liebknecht in the A. A. Z.* 

Re 2. The day I came to your office, the two issues of the 
National-Zeitung’ (the first contained the libellous excerpts and 
comments later reprinted in the Telegraph) had just reached me 
from Berlin. There was utter commotion at home, and my poor 
wife was in a truly pitiful state. At the same time, I received a 
letter from Germany informing me that, besides your statements 
published in the A. A. Z., Vogt’s libellous work included a letter 
of yours, from which your close relationship with Vogt was all too 
apparent,” and that, in particular, your name was the only one of 
any note out of which Vogt made political capital and which lent 
plausibility to his infamies in the eyes of the public. Imagine 
yourself in similar circumstances and then ask yourself whether, in 
your own case, spleen might not momentarily have prevailed over 
reason. 

Let me repeat once again that this letter has nothing to do with 
private interests. In the London lawsuit I could have you suspornarp 
aS a witness without your prior permission. As regards the Berlin 
lawsuit, I am in possession of letters from you which, if required, I 
could place on the record. Nor do I stand alone in this matter. 
From every side—Belgium, Switzerland, France and England— 
Vogt’s libellous attack has brought me unexpected allies, even 
from among people who belong to quite a different school of 
thought. 

But in the first place it would anyhow be better for both parties, 
as for the cause, to act en entente. 

In the second, I must tell you frankly that I cannot resign 
myself to losing, as a result of irrelevant misunderstandings, one 
of the few men whom I have loved as friends, in the eminent 
sense of the word. 

a F, Freiligrath, ‘Erklarung’, Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 345 (supplement), 11 December 
1859. - > K. Blind, ‘Erklarung’, Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 345 (supplement), 11 De- 
cember 1859. - © containing the items ‘Karl Vogt und die Allgemeine Zeitung’, N.-Z., 
No. 37, 22 January, and ‘Wie man radikale Flugblatter macht’, N.-Z., No. 41, 
25 January 1860 - ¢ [K. Abel,] ‘The Journalistic Auxiliaries of Austria’, The Daily 
Telegraph, No. 1439, 6 February 1860. 

If I have failed you in any way, I am at all times ready to admit 
to my error. Nihil humani a me alienum puto. 

Finally, I understand very well that, in your present position, 
any affair such as the one under consideration could only be 
obnoxious to you. 

You, for your part, will realise that it is Se sc to count you 
out altogether. 

Firstly, because Vogt is making political capital out of your name 
and pretending to have your approval in his indiscriminate 
mudslinging at a party which prides itself on counting you as one 
of its number. 

Moreover, you happen to be the only member of the former 
Cologne Central Authority” who, between the end of 1849 and 
the spring of 1851, lived in Cologne and has since that time lived 
in London. 

Inasmuch as we have both consciously, each in his own way, out 
of the purest of motives and with an utter disregard for private 
interests, been flourishing the banner for ‘la classe la plus laborieuse 
et la plus misérable** high above the heads of the philistines for 
years now, I should regard it as a contemptible offence against 
history, were we to fall out over trifles, all of them attributable to 
misunderstandings. 

In sincere friendship 

Your 
Karl Marx