[London,] 11 February [1865] 

Dear Fred, 

It being Saturday today, I am assuming you won’t be sending 
off your thing“ this very day, so there will still be time for these 
‘supplementary’ suggestions for changes: 

1. In the passage where you ask what the workers want? I would 
not answer as you do that the workers in Germany, France and 

@ information bureau - > See this volume, p. 73.- © ‘President Lincoln and the 
International Working Men’s Association’, The Express, 6 February 1865. - 
4 F. Engels, The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party. 

England are demanding this and that. The answer sounds as 
though (at least, that’s what it will be taken to mean) we have 
accepted Izzy’s* slogans. I would be inclined to say rather?: 

It would seem that the demands put forward at the present 
moment by the most advanced workers in Germany amount to the 
following, etc. This doesn’t commit you at all, which is all to the 
good, as later on you yourself criticise universal suffrage if not 
accompanied by the requisite conditions. (Morever, in England 
e.g., etc., the word ‘direct’ would indeed be meaningless, it is after 
all only the opposite of the ‘indirect’ suffrage invented by the 
Prussians.) The form in which the louts in Germany conceive of 
state intervention a la Lassalle is such that one must anyhow take 
care not to identify oneself with ‘same’. It would be a lot more 
dignified (and safer), if you took the louts at their word and let 
them say for themselves what they want. (I say the louts because they 
are the really argumentative section who have been infected by 
Lassalle.) '*° 

2. I would not say that the 1848-49 movement failed because the 
bourgeois opposed direct universal suffrage. What happened was 
rather that this was proclaimed by the people of Frankfurt to be 
an ancient German right and proclaimed by the Imperial Regent‘ 
with all due formality.’ (In my opinion, too, as soon as the matter 
comes up for serious discussion in dear old Germany, this 
franchise must be treated as a rightfully existing law.) As that is no 
place for a lengthy exposition, I would make do with the following 
phrase: that the bourgeois at that time preferred peace and 
servitude to the mere prospect of struggle and freedom, or 
something of that sort. 

Taken as a whole, it’s a very good piece, and ‘Oi’ am particularly 
tickled by the passage which shows that the present louts’ movement 
in Fact ONly exists par la grace de la police. 

In great haste. 

Salut. 

Your 
K. M. 

I have crossed out the bit where you console the reactionaries, I 
DON'T KNow wy, by saying that a soldier does not turn reactionary in 

a Lassalle’s - » A sentence deleted by Marx follows here: ‘This is not the place for you 
to set out your own view—or alternatively you could drop the introductory section 
and just say the following:’. - © Archduke John of Austria - ¢ by gracious permission 
of the police 

the 3rd year—or not for long—although you later say the 
opposite.