Karl Marx to Karl Schapper
in London
Manchester, Monday, 27 February 1860
(Draft)

6, Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road, Manchester,
27 Feb. 1860.
Dear Schapper,

I have written to Liebknecht to communicate Vogt’s book to you, so that you may convince yourself of the importance of the Berlin case against the National-Zeitung (that against the Telegraph is secondary) for the historical vindication of our party and its future standing in Germany. Yesterday I received a letter from my attorney in Berlin, according to which Herr Zabel of the National-Zeitung is likely to pay for his zeal on Vogt’s behalf by a closer acquaintance with the house of correction. My attorney considers it essential that, before a London magistrate (the one from Bow Street is our man, already knows Liebknecht, who can go with you), you should as soon as possible make the following affidavit, or an affidavit to similar effect:

“I declare herewith, that, in the year etc., Cherval (alias Cramer etc.)
was introduced by myself into the London Branch of the German friendly society called ‘Der Bund’ (the Union) (a society, by the by, which
has ceased to exist long time since); that in etc. 1848 the said passed
through Cologne where he had a short interview with me, which I did not
even mention to Dr. Karl Marx. Cherval being an individual then utterly
unknown to Dr. K.M.; that in 1851-2, during his stay at Paris, Cherval
belonged to, and corresponded with that branch of the German friendly
society called ‘Der Bund’ which at the time was directed by myself and
Mr. Willich, now living at Cincinnati, U. St.; that, during the autumn of
1852, after his || return from Paris to London, Cherval entered the public
German Workingmen’s Society, called ‘Der Arbeiterbildungsverein’, of
which he had formerly been a member and which, at the time, was directed by myself and the above said Mr. Willich; that consequent upon
the revelations publicly made at Cologne against Cherval during the trial
of Dr. Becker and others, and upon other information derived from ot-

her sources, the said Cherval was publicly expulsed from the German

166. Marx to Karl Schapper – 27 February 1860

Workingmen Club above named, and, soon after, disappeared from London.”

Engels sends you his best regards; he will, by the way, come over to London himself in the course of the spring. I beg you to lose no time.
Salut
D
K. M.

In the affidavit we speak of “friendly society”, because a thing of that kind sounds quite above suspicion to an English magistrate, and one can, after all, understand by “friendly society” whatever one pleases.

Peter Nothjung to Karl Marx
in London
Breslau, Monday, 27 February 1860

I Breslau, 27 February 1860.
Dear Marx!

In the Volkszeitung I have read your address and your declaration against the National-Zeitung. An article similar to the one in the National-Zeitung was also published by the Breslauer Zeitung from the pen of its daily contributor, Dr. Stein – the same Dr. Stein who sat on the extreme Left in the National Assembly in Berlin together with d’Ester, and who moved the well-known motion against the officers of the Prussian army. This great Stein, of small body, has been suspended from his post as teacher, and since the present ministry came into existence has made it his business to agitate on its behalf, not only during last year’s elections but even now, to unite the Silesian democracy with the constitutionalists. In spite of this, he has been refused permission to give private lessons by the present ministry, not just once but several times. The ministry that stepped down had tacitly tolerated his doing so; the present one, however, has forbidden it as illegal. He has now been to Berlin to obtain this permission; further details about it were given in the same number of the Volkszeitung that contained your declaration, though certainly without his consent. Stein also recently had the “sulphur gang” performed at the Breslau Resources Society during the carnival fool’s procession; nevertheless, Stein, Schlehan, Semrau and their devotees have to swallow one humiliation after another from the constitutionalists, but this sort does not allow itself to be put off from continuing in patriotism. What do you say to these choice folk!? || After my sentence, I was sent, as you probably know, to the fortress of Glatz, and there I had the pleasure of being allowed to reside, and that not especially brilliantly, for 6 years. Three days before my release from the fortress, the commandant there communicated to me the decision of the government of Cologne, by which, on the application of the police president Geiger, I was expelled from Cologne, and on the application of the mayor of Mülheim, declared homeless on account of long years of absence, and forbidden to enter the area within a radius of 5 miles of Cologne. In that short space of time I could do no more than protest against it, because my absence was not voluntary. Upon arriving in Breslau, I met the former lieutenant of the

167. Peter Nothjung to Marx – 27 February 1860

25 Infantry Regiment, Adamski, one of the two officers who,
35 at the instigation of the q. Funk, went to Lüttich and from there to Paris on account of a speech held at the democratic meeting in Cologne, and who later surrendered in Cologne and were sent to the fortress for desertion. He took me in and taught me photography, which he practises here with much success. My release coincided with the elections, and it is to this circumstance that I owe being overlooked in Breslau and thus tolerated by the police, although in the summer people were astonished and believed that I was staying here without announcing myself. At the same time that the authorities began to take notice of me, I requested a travelling trade permit so as to earn my bread with photography on my travels; as was to be expected, I was turned down. Now the thing was to scrape along for a while longer and then to apply for the right of residence here; this I have done, and after a couple of months’ delay I obtained it on the 14th of the current month, and now I am supposed to pay immigration money, household money, and who knows what else, and I haven’t earned a single penny for ten years. – I beg you most cordially and urgently to forward the enclosed letter to the singer K. Tormes, as I do not know his address. Tormes is a friend of my youth; you can easily guess that the matter turns on a loan. Do write to me with some news and tell me how you and your family are; little Müsch must be quite big by now!
55 With greetings to you, your worthy family and friends,
Your
P. Nothjung
Photographer, Zwingergasse No. 7 in the Bath Establishment.

I beg you once more, most urgently and speedily, to forward the enclosed!
60 I

Collet Dobson Collet to Karl Marx
in Manchester
London, Tuesday, 28 February 1860

28 February 1860
My dear Sir

Pray send back the enclosed by return of post—Will you be so kind as to send
stamps for the Printer’s bill.—
Yours faithfully 3
CDCollet
Dr MarxI

Ferdinand Freiligrath to Karl Marx
in Manchester
London, Tuesday, 28 February 1860

128 February 1860
Dear Marx,

I have received your various letters. I thank you sincerely for the assurances, given in your last, that recent misunderstandings have left your friendship undimmed, and I reciprocate them from the heart.

My long silence in reply to your earlier letters you have quite rightly interpreted. The contradiction between the tone of those letters and the decided hostility of your brusque visit that evening could not but seem strange to me. Now all is well – your explanations fully satisfy me. You have long known, since the red earth days, that petty resentments are not my way.

So far, then, we are in complete agreement. I rejoice that I know you still to be my old friend, and I bring to meet you those sentiments, just as warmly and faithfully, of whose sincerity and constancy you have had the opportunity to convince yourself over these twelve years.

But now let me speak openly and honestly with you on other matters! With all personal friendship for you, and with all my holding fast to our common principles, I must nonetheless decidedly decline to make your quarrel with Vogt, Blind, the National-Zeitung and the Daily Telegraph my own! Repellent as it is to me, whatever you may say as to its reach—I had no share in bringing it about in any way—and I do not consider myself obliged to follow you into its labyrinths.

That, in the impending London case, you may summon me as a witness, that for the Berlin case you may give old letters of mine ad acta, is another thing, and if you proceed with this against my wish, I naturally cannot prevent it.

Not much, however, will come of it. As a witness I can only confirm what Blind himself admits and has only recently stated in the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung in an advertisement “Against Karl Vogt”: – namely, that he is convinced of Vogt’s guilt, and that since receiving that || letter from Vogt last spring he has never made a secret of this conviction. But this testimony (and I can give no other) proves nothing regarding the authorship of the fly-

sine
studio!!!

169. Ferdinand Freiligrath to Marx – 28 February 1860

sheet – which I have never set eyes on, which I only came to know through the reproduction in the Volk, and which I learned solely through you and Liebknecht to be by Blind.

The same applies to the letters to be given ad acta, in so far as they are to establish my relation to you and the party. This relation requires no establishing. It is sufficiently established by my participation in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, by my embroilment in the Cologne trial, and by my renewed exile since 1851. The placing ad acta and the possible publication of those letters can therefore be a matter of indifference to me. Everyone knows, and I stand by, my past!

Nevertheless, and although I have always remained true, and shall remain true, to the banner of the “classe la plus laborieuse et la plus misérable”, you know as well as I that my relation to the party as it was, and my relation to the party as it is, are of a thoroughly different nature. When, towards the end of 1852, the League was declared dissolved in consequence of the Cologne trial, I freed myself from all the fetters which the party, as such, had laid upon me, and maintained only a personal relation to you, the friend and the comrade in convictions. For these seven years I have stood aloof from the party; its meetings have been unattended by me, its resolutions and actions have remained foreign to me. So, in fact, my relation to the party had long been dissolved; we have never deceived each other about it; it was a kind of tacit convention between us. And I can only say that I have felt at ease with it. My nature, and the nature of every poet, needs freedom! Even the party is a cage, and one sings better, even for the party, outside it than inside. I was a poet of the proletariat and of the revolution long before I became a member of the League and a member of the editorial board of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung! So I intend henceforth to stand on my own feet, to belong only to myself, and to dispose of myself myself!

Another consideration has never made me regret my staying aloof from the Party. When I think of all the ambiguous and depraved elements that, despite every precaution, have already known how to force their way into the Party; when I pass in review Teilering, Bangya, Fleury and what they are all called; when I must finally consider that in the Cologne trial my name was mentioned in one and the same bill of indictment with that of a subject like Reiff: – then, out of a feeling of cleanliness alone, I am overjoyed that I have de facto no longer belonged for a long time to an association that could daily bring me again into similar contact.

If this de facto no longer belonging must also be formally expressed, I herewith desire to have it formally expressed – sine ira et studio, and with repeated full emphasis of my ever-constant friendly sentiments towards you personally!

You will not fail to recognise, dear Marx, that the Vogt-Blind affair has merely occasioned the expression of this state of affairs, not the state of affairs itself. Any earlier analogous case would have already led to the same explanations.

169. Ferdinand Freiligrath to Marx – 28 February 1860

What need I add much further? Solely the assurance that I shall be heartily glad if you will remain well disposed towards me in the old way, even after I have unreservedly given you the foregoing declarations.

But one thing more! There is a passage in your letter that I do not understand. It is this: –
“Moreover, you happen to be the sole member of the former Cologne Central Authority who dwelt in Cologne from the end of 1849 until the spring of 1851, and from then until now in London.” – Do you mean thereby to indicate that the Berlin trials (your own and the Eichhoff-Stieber trial, for which you are supplying material to the editor of the “Hermann”), are intended to bring with them revelations about the Cologne trial of 1852? As for me, although my position in the League was by no means established at the Cologne proceedings, – although my case is still pending! – this could not further affect me. To stand a little more or less black in the black book matters nothing to me, and I would therefore simply be astonished, if the Prussian police were now to be handed on a platter, through these later trials, things which remained unproven in 1852, for arbitrary use! But you must not forget that there are people living in Germany who could be more seriously affected by such subsequent revelations, and that any incident of this kind would, with the fullest right, be grist to the mill of your enemies. You certainly also did not intend that I should read such a meaning between the lines of that passage. As I said, I do not understand it.

In unchanging friendship,
Yours,
FFreiligrath

Eduard Fischel to Friedrich Engels
in Manchester
Berlin, Wednesday, 29 February 1860

Berlin, 29 February 1860
Dear Sir!

I received the enclosed letter today from Duncker. I have spoken with Weidling.

He does not want to. The manuscript is now with Behrendt. Tomorrow I shall write or telegraph the answer.

Yours respectfully and obediently,
E. Fischel
49 U. d. Linden.

Wilhelm Liebknecht to Karl Marx
in Manchester
London, Wednesday, 29 February 1860

14 Church Street, Soho
Wednesday.
Dear Mohr.

Schapper has no time before tomorrow to go to the magistrates, and I shall not see the club president, whose address I was unable to find out, until this evening at the club. So you will have to be patient for another 24 hours.

Schapper has made the following changes to the declaration: instead of introduced by myself – “introduced by a German working man, myself being present”, further, instead of “entered the Verein at the time directed by myself and Willich” – “visited the Verein of which I was a member as well as Willich”. Since the modifications are not essential, I raised no objection.

I shall be finished with my remarks concerning Vogt’s book at the beginning of next week.

Warm greetings from my wife and your
W. Liebknecht.

P.S. I would have written to you yesterday, but I was caught in the rain in Islington with my wife, or rather caught in a hailstorm, so that I missed the post.