Manchester, 27 January 1865 

Dear Moor, 

I will send the letters back to you tomorrow or on Sunday, as I 
simply have to read this dreadful handwriting and these pale inks 
by daylight; yesterday evening I was only able to skim through 
them. 

Moses? really has been extraordinarily tactless (no doubt the 
head of the party’ took a certain malicious pleasure in it), but 
Liebknecht even more so. But I am surprised the latter has not 
already committed more such gaffes, it always was his rorte. 

I am sending the fellows the little Danish folksong about 
Tidmann, who is struck dead by the old man at the Thing for 
imposing new taxes on the peasants. It is revolutionary but not 
indictable, and above all it is directed against the feudal nobility, 
which the paper‘ absolutely must condemn. I am making a few 
remarks to that effect. I shall probably be able to do the article on 
the reorganisation of the army‘ as soon as I get the new military 
budget proposals, etc.; I am writing to ask them to send them to 

a Moses Hess (see this volume, pp. 65,66) - > Bernhard Becker - © F. Engels, ‘Herr 
Tidmann. Old Danish Folk Song’. - 4 Der Social-Demokrat - © F. Engels, The Prussian 
Military Question and the German Workers’ Party. 

me and am telling them at the same time that I shall be coming 
out against the government—past aNp present—just as much as 
against the men of Progress,*? and that the article must not be 
published if the first point is unacceptable to them. As far as the 
American war is concerned, perhaps something can be made of it 
at a later date after all. The present phase is not yet complete, the 
calm, to use J. Grimm’s term, is ‘inorganic’. 

Good old Lassalle is after all gradually being unmasked as a 
common or garden scoundrel. It has never been our practice to 
judge people by what they thought but rather by what they were, 
and I do not see why we should make an exception in the late 
Izzy's case. Subjectively, his vanity may have made the affair seem 
plausible to him, but objectively it was the act of a scoundrel, the 
betrayal of the whole workers’ movement to the Prussians. 
Throughout, the stupid fop does not seem to have obtained from 
Bismarck anything at all in return, nothing specific at all, let alone 
guarantees **; he seems just to have taken it for granted he would 
definitely do Bismarck in the eye, in exactly the same way as he could 
not fail to shoot Racowita dead. That’s Baron Izzy all over 
for you. 

Incidentally, it will not be very long now before it becomes not 
merely desirable but necessary to make this whole affair public. We 
can only gain from it, and, if the business with the Association * 
and the paper in Germany bears fruit, the fellow’s heirs will have 
to be thrown out soon enough now. Meanwhile, the proletariat in 
Germany will soon see what it has got in Bismarck. 

Kind regards to the caprs. 

Your 
F. E. 

I can only see my way to disposing of approx. '/y dozen cards; I 
will see Jones about it, I’m very busy just now.