[London,} 15 August 1863 

Dear Frederick, 

May the devil take me, as the red one* used to say, if I didn’t 
get up every morning this week with the firm intention of writing 
to you. But no sooner did I reach my study than I allayed my 
conscience by pleading that all I wanted was to add half a dozen 
lines to the manuscript at the point where I had broken off the 
day before.” And once I had departed from the path of 
righteousness, I saw that the evil deed is accursed in that it must 
constantly engender evil.” 

My family left for Hastings last Friday.°** The departure took 
place so tardily because Lenchen had had to spend a fortnight in 
Germany in connection with family affairs. 

The enclosed photographs** (the children forced me to have 
mine taken) will soon be followed by those of Jenny and Laura. 

In one respect, my work (preparing the manuscript for the 
press) is going well. In the final elaboration the stuff is, I think, 
assuming a tolerably popular form, aside from a few unavoidable 
M—C’s and C—M’s.° On the other hand, despite the fact that I 
write all day long, it’s not getting on as fast as my own impatience, 
long subjected to a trial of patience, might demand. At all events, it 
will be 100 p. c. more comprehensible than No. 1.4 When, by the 
by, I consider my handiwork and realise how I’ve had to demolish 
everything and even build up the historical section’ out of what 
was in part quite unknown material, I can’t help finding Izzy a bit 
of a joke; for he has already got ‘his’ political economy in hand 
and yet everything he has peddled around hitherto has shown him 
to be a callow schoolboy who trumpets abroad as his very latest 
discovery, with the most repulsive and impertinent garrulity, 
theses that we were doling out 20 years ago as small change to our 
PARTISANS, and ten times better at that. In other respects, too, this 

@ Ferdinand Wolff - > Paraphrase of a passage from Schiller’s Die Piccolomini, Act V, 
Scene 1. - © M{oney]—C[ommodity], C[ommodity]— M[oney]. - 4 K. Marx, A Con- 
tribution to the Critique of Political Economy. - © See Economic manuscript of 1861-63, 
Notebooks VI-XV (present edition, Vols. 31-33). 

same Izzy is storing up in his manure factory our party faeces 
excreted 20 years ago which he proposes to use as fertilizer for 
world history. Thus, for instance, he got the Nordstern to print a 
letter of support from ‘Herwegh’ (who has undoubtedly given 
proof of his platonic love of the ‘principle of labour’).* Because the 
same Nordstern is edited by that ne’er-do-we’el Bruhn, whom 
Lassalle bought from Blind. Thus, Izzy has nominated ‘Moses Hess’ 
his ‘proconsul in the Rhine Province’, etc. And he still seems 
unable to shake off the idée fixe that his praises should be sung by 
Freiligrath, who would never dream of doing so. For he has again 
got his Leipzig ‘proconsul’ to summon F. urgently, citing the good 
example of G. Herwegh. If only he knew how F. and I had 
laughed about this renewed onslaught! 

‘Oh Izzy, Oh Izzy, didst thou not see 
That Herwegh and Moses thy gallows would be?’ 

The philistines down here are furious with The Times for 
having fobbed them off so nicely over the Conreprrate Loan.>” 
After all, those worthies might have known if only from Cobbett’s 
disclosures, that The Times is nothing but a ‘commercial CONCERN’, 
which doesn’t give a damn how the satance turns out, providing it 
is @ BALANCE IN ITs own FAvour.”! The Times chaps, such as 
J. Spence—‘tuar man’, according to the Richmond Enquirer, ‘whom we 
HAVE PAID IN SOLID GoLp’—obtained the Loan scries partly for nothing, 
partly at a 50 p. c. piscounr on the nominal rate. So, to cry them 
up till they reached 105 was a nice piece of business. 

It is, I should say, of prime importance to the Unrrep Srares that 
they should seize the remaining ports, Charleston, Mobile, etc., 
because they may be involved in a clash with Boustrapa any day 
now. That same imperial Lazarillo de Tormes is presently 
caricaturing, not only his uncle,‘ but even himself. For after all, 
the ‘surrrace’ in Mexico is a pretty caricature, not only of the 
suffrage Whereby he turned himself into a Frenchman, but also of 
that whereby he made Nice and Savoy French.*” I myself am in 
no doubt that Mexico will be the hurdle at which he’ll break his 
neck, provided he hasn’t been hanged first. 

The Polish affair has gone completely off the rails because of 
this same Boustrapa, and the influence his intrigues have given 
the Czartoryski party. Colonel Lapiiski, who returned a few days 

4 Georg Herwegh’s message to Lassalle of 5 June 1863 announcing his accession to 
the General Association of German Workers, Nordstern, No. 221, 18 July 
1863. - > Marx means O. Dammer. - © Napoleon I 

since from the ill-fated trip he undertook with Bakunin and to 
which Palmerston put so neat an end on the Swedish coast,” 
complains bitterly about the committees in Warsaw, London and 
Paris being wholly under Bonap.-Czartor. influence. 

Our fatherland would seem to be in a pitiful state. In the 
absence of a licking administered from without, there’s no doing 
anything with these curs. 

Apropos. Since you wrote your book about England,* a second 
Children’s Employment Commission Report” has at long last appeared. It 
shows that all those horrors that were banished from certain 
spheres of industry by the Factory Acts, have proliferated with 
redoubled vigour wherever there is no control! It would make a 
splendid sequel to your book, once the complete reports have 
come out. 

My congratulations to Gumpert. At any rate, he has seen to it 
that his marriage did not remain childless. 

In Borchardt’s case, the flesh would appear to be more urgent 
than befits his priestly office. And he’ll make all the other Jewesses 
jealous. 

Is Lupus back? If so, give him my kindest regards. There’s 
nothing I should like better just now than to have you here for a 
couple of days so that I could chat and go drinking with you. It’s 
such a long time since we were together. 

Salut. 

Your 

‘Pi’ has been answered.‘ 
Apropos. Among the curious information I have gleaned at the 
Museum, was the following: 

‘Verum inventum, hoc est, munera Germaniae, ab ipsa primitus reperta, non ex vino, ut 
calumniator (an Englishman, that is) [quidam] sceptice invehit, sed vi inami et corporis 
et reliquo orbi communicata, etc.’, auctore Michaelo Maiero, Francofurti, 1619. 

The miunera and discoveries Germaniae are: 

a The Condition of the Working Class in England - » Children’s Employment Commission 
(1862). First Report of the Commissioners, London, 1863. -¢ See this volume, 
p. 484.- 4 [M. Mayer,] ‘The true discovery or the achievements of Germany, first discovered 
by herself, not in intoxication from wine, as a certain calumniator ... sceptically maintains, 
but by strength of body and mind and communicated to the rest of the world, etc.’, 
author Michael Mayer, Frankfurt,.1619. 

‘Roman imperial dignity, gunpowder, book printing, religious reform, the 
medicaments of Theophrastus Paracelsus, the secrets of the Rosicrucians5*4— 
Inventum politicum, bellicum, litteraricum, theologicum, medicum, chymicum.’ 4