MARX TO ENGELS“**? 

{London,] 30 July [1862] 

Dear Engels, 

From the enclosed scrawls you will partly see how soruerep I am. 
So far, the canptorp has allowed himself to be placated; he has yet 
to receive £25. The piano chap, who is being paid in instalments 
for the piano, should already have had £6 at the end of June, and 
is a most ill-mannered brute. I have rate demands in the house 
amounting to £6. The wretched school fees—some £10—I have 
fortunately been able to pay, for I do my utmost to spare the 
children direct humiliation. I have paid the butcher $6 on account 
(the sum total of my quarterly takings from the Presse!), but I’m 
again being dunned by that fellow, not to mention the baker, the 
TEAGROCER, the GREENGROCER, and such other sons of Belial as there 
may be. 

The Jewish niccer Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the 
end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an 
ill-judged speculation. The chap would sooner throw money down 
the drain than lend it to a ‘friend’, even though his interest and 
capital were guaranteed. In this he bases himself on the view that 
he ought to live the life of a Jewish baron, or Jew created a baron 
(no doubt by the countess’). Just imagine! This fellow, knowing 
about the American affair, etc., and hence about the state of 
crisis I’m in, had the insolence to’ ask me whether I would be 
willing to hand over one of my daughters to la Hatzfeldt as 
a ‘companion’, and whether he himself should secure Gersten- 
berg’s (!) patronage for me! The fellow has wasted my time and, what 
is more, the dolt opined that, since I was not engaged upon any 
‘business’ just now, but merely upon a ‘theoretical work’, I might just 
as well kill time with him! In order to keep up certain dehors? vis-a-vis 
the fellow, my wife had to put in pawn everything that wasn’t actually 
nailed or bolted down! 

Had I not been in this appalling position and vexed by the way 
this parvenu flaunted his money bags, he’d have amused me 
tremendously. Since I last saw him a year ago, he’s gone quite 
mad. His head has been completely turned by his stay in Zurich 
(with Riistow, Herwegh, etc.) and the subsequent trip to Italy and, 
after that, by his Herr Julian Schmidt, etc. He is now indisputably, 
not only the greatest scholar, the profoundest thinker, the most 
brilliant man of science, and so forth, but also and in addition, 
Don Juan cum revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. Add to this, the 
incessant chatter in a high, falsetto voice, the unaesthetic, 
histrionic gestures, the dogmatic tone! 

As a profound secret, he told me and my wife that he had 
advised Garibaldi not to make Rome the target of his attack but 
instead proceed to Naples, there set himself up as dictator 
(without affronting Victor Emmanuel), and call out the people’s 
army for a campaign against Austria. Lassalle had him conjure 
300,000 men out of thin air—with whom, of course, the 
Piedmontese army joined forces. And then, in accordance with a 
plan approved, so he says, by Mr Rustow, a detached corps was to 
make, or rather set sail, for the Adriatic coast (Dalmatia) and incite 
Hungary to revolt, while, heedless of the Quadrilateral,*” the 
main body of the army under Garibaldi marched from Padua to 
Vienna, where the population instantly rebelled. All over in 6 

a Sophie von Hatzfeldt - > appearances -< F. Lassalle, Herr Julian Schmidt der 
Literarhistoriker. 

weeks. The fulcrum of the action—Lassalle’s political influence, or 
his pen, in Berlin. And Riistow at the head of a corps of German 
volunteers attached to Garibaldi. Bonaparte, on the other hand, 
was paralysed by this Lassallean coup d’éclat? 

He has just been to see Mazzini, and ‘the latter, too,’ approved and 
‘admired’ his plan. 

He introduced himself to these people as the ‘representative of 
the German revolutionary working class’ and assumed they knew 
(to use his own words) that his (Izzy’s) ‘pamphlet on the Italian 
war? had prevented Prussia’s intervention’ and, 1n act, that he had 
controlled ‘the history of the past three years’. Lassalle was 
absolutely furious with me and my wife for poking fun at his 
plans, quizzing him as ‘an enlightened Bonapartist’, etc. He 
shouted, blustered, flung himself about and finally got it fixed in 
his mind that I was too ‘abstract’ to understand politics. 

As to America, it’s of no interest whatever, he says. The Yankees 
have no ‘ideas’. ‘The freedom of the individual’ is merely a 
‘negative idea’, etc., and other antiquated, mouldering, speculative 
rubbish of the same ilk. 

As I have said, if circumstances had been different (and he 
hadn’t disrupted my work), the chap would have amused me 
tremendously. 

And on top of it all, the sheer gluttony and wanton lechery of 
this ‘idealist’! 

It is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the 
way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the 
negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his 
mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a niccer). Now, 
this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and 
basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a 
peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike. 

If, by the by, Mr Ritistow was responsible for thinking up the 
march from Padua to Vienna, I should say that he also has a screw 
loose. 

Salut. 

Your 
K. M. 

One of our niccer’s great discoveries—which, however, he only 
confides to his ‘closest friends’—is that the Pelasgians were of 

a brilliant coup - > [F. Lassalle,] Der italienische Krieg und die Aufgabe Preupens. Eine 
Stimme aus der Demokratie, Berlin, 1859. 

‘Semitic descent. The main evidence: in the Book of Maccabbees,’ 
the Jews send emissaries to solicit the help of Greece on grounds 
of kinship. Furthermore, an Etruscan inscription has been found 
in Perugia, and this was simultaneously deciphered by Hofrat 
Stiicker in Berlin and an Italian, and both independently 
converted the Etruscan into the Hebrew alphabet. 

So that we can no longer discomfit him with ‘Biur Booxs’,**? he 
has bought 20 pounds’ worth of sive sooxs (under Bucher’s 
guidance). 

He has converted Bucher to socialism, or so he maintains. Now 
Bucher’s quite a fine little man, if a cranky one, and, in any case, I 
can’t believe that he has accepted Lassalle’s ‘foreign policy’. Bucher 
is the ‘compositress’ in Julian Schmidt.* 

If you’d been here just for a day or two, you’d have been able to 
lay in enough material to keep you laughing for a whole year. 
That’s why I was so anxious to have you here. One doesn’t get an 
opportunity like that every day.