Manchester, 27 February 1861 

Dear Mother, 

I would have liked to answer your dear letter straight away, but 
with Emil’s* being here, have been so taken up with current 
business that it has been quite impossible. Well, he left yesterday 
morning and will probably reach Engelskirchen tonight. Dear 
mother, you have no need to worry about the possibility of my 
bearing any grudge against my brothers” over the matter of the 
firm; it wouldn’t occur to me. It was extremely disagreeable for 
me to have to withdraw from the family business in this way, nor 
could I find it agreeable when something I looked upon as a right 
to which I was entitled was lightly passed over for all kinds of 
reasons that had no bearing whatever on that right, my assent 
being, so to speak, demanded as a matter of course.“ I do not 
suggest that things haven’t been arranged as well as, if not better 
than, they might have been had my claim been taken into 
consideration, but this is precisely what no one has taken the 
trouble to explain to me, and you cannot deny that, in the 
circumstances, it was expecting rather much of me to sign the 
thing. But having done so, I regard it as settled and you can count 
on me not to bear any of my brothers the slightest grudge about 
that. We shall need one another often enough and, besides, you 
know that I’m not in the’ least inclined to play the noble soul of 
whom no one takes note. I am sure Emil didn’t notice any 

4 Emil Engels - > Hermann, Emil and Rudolf - © See this volume, p. 260.