[London,] 12 June 1863 
British Museum 

Dear Engels, 

I hereby acknowledge the £10 with many thanks. Being 
uncertain whether you would be able to send the money 
for Monday, and in view of the great fear of bills of exchange 
which obtains in this house, I had simultaneously written to 
Dronke. 

For the past four weeks little Jenny has again had a slight 
cough. Today I sent her to see Dr Allen. 

I myself am not quite fit either, but am rid of my worst 
complaint. In the meantime, which would certainly delight Vogt, I 
have been wolfing sulphur! 

Izzy has sent me (and you, too, perhaps) the speech he made in 
court about indirect taxation. One or two individual bits are good, 
but for one thing it is, on the whole, written in an unbearably 
officious, chatty style, with absurd pretensions to scholarship and 
consequentialness. In addition, it is essentiellement the confection of 
a ‘pupil’ who cannot wait to make a name for himself as a 
‘thoroughly learned’ man and original scholar. Hence the abun- 
dance of historical and theoretical blunders. One example may 
suffice (should you not have read the thing yourself). To impress 
the court and the public, he tries to give a kind of retrospective 
history of the argument against indirect taxation and therefore, 
going back at random beyond Boisguillebert and Vauban, cites 
Bodin, etc. And here he shows himself to be the schoolboy par 
excellence. He omits the physiocrats, clearly ignorant of the fact that 
everything A. Smith, etc., wrote on the subject was cribbed from 
them and that in general they were the protagonists where this 
‘question’ was concerned. Likewise, ‘indirect taxation’ is, in true 
schoolboy fashion, seen as ‘bourgeois taxation’, and so indeed it 
was ‘in the Middle Ages’, but not today (not, at least, where the 

bourgeoisie is developed), to discover which he need seek no 
further than Mr R. Gladstone et co. in Liverpool. The jackass 
doesn’t appear to know that the argument against ‘indirect’ 
taxation is one of the platforms of the English and American 
friends of ‘Schulze-Delitzsch’ et cie, and hence isn’t at any rate 
directed against them—the Free-Traders, I mean. Again, in true 
schoolboy fashion he applies a proposition of Ricardo’s to the 
Prussian real estate tax. (Quite wrong, this.) Quite touching, how 
he imparts to the court ‘his’ discoveries, the fruit of the most 
profound ‘learning and truth’ and of terrible ‘night vigils’, namely 
that, 

in the Middle Ages ‘landed property’ prevailed, 

in later times ‘capital’, and at present 

the ‘principle of the workers’ estate’, ‘labour’, or the ‘moral 
principle of labour’; and, on the same day as he was imparting this 
discovery to the louts, Senior Councillor to the Government 
Engel (knowing nothing about him) was imparting it to a more 
distinguished audience at the Academy of Singing. He and Engel 
exchanged ‘epistolary’ congratulations upon their ‘simultaneous’ 
scientific findings. 

The ‘workers’ estate’ and the ‘moral principle’ are indeed 
achievements on the part of Izzy and the Senior Councillor to the 
Government. 

I have not been able to bring myself to write to the fellow since 
the beginning of this year. 

If I commented on his stuff, ’'d be wasting my time; besides, he 
appropriates every word as a ‘discovery’. To rub his nose in his 
plagiarism would be absurd since, in view of the state they are in 
after he has finished with them, I have no desire to relieve him of 
our ideas. Nor would it do to accord recognition to such 
rodomontade and indiscretions. The fellow would instantly exploit 
it. 

So, there’s nothing to be done but wait until he ultimately boils 
over. Then I shall have a very nice excuse, namely that (like 
Senior Councillor to the Government Engel) he is for ever 
insisting it’s not ‘communism’. So, in my reply, I shall say that, had 
I wished to take any notice of him, these repeated asseverations of 
his would have compelled me 

1. to show the public how and where he had cribbed from us; 

2. how and wherein we differ from his stuff. 

Hence, so as not to compromise ‘communism’ in any way or 
injure him, I had ignored him completely. 

Come to that, the chap is making all this hullabaloo out of sheer 
vanity. Throughout 1859 he was heart and soul for the Prussian 
liberal bourgeois party. Now he may find it more convenient to 
attack the ‘bourgeois’ under the auspices oF THE GOVERNMENT than to 
attack the ‘Russians’. To rail against the Austrians and adulate the 
Italians has always been as typical of your Berliner as to keep one’s 
trap shut about the Russians, which is what the valiant lad does. 

Salut. 

Your 
K. M.