Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels  
in Manchester  
London, Saturday, 19 August 1865  

19 August 1865.  
Dear Fred,

As you are setting off on your travels, I must inform you that on 28 Aug. I have a bill of £10 to pay to my butcher and the landlord is also becoming very troublesome. By the by, the English state seems hard pressed for money. At least the tax-gatherers were more pressing this month than ever and have “relieved” me unexpectedly.

I am still sick, although Allen has removed the liver complaints. But now a kind of influenza has come, whose end he promises me in 5–6 days, and which is indeed of all things the most troublesome, as far as mental activity is concerned. I hope with this I have paid my debt to nature.

Laurachen is also not quite well. She has been getting much thinner than necessary for a year already. But she is a peculiar child and only today resolved to go with my wife to the doctor. I hope it is nothing serious. Jennychen and Tussy are very well. (Ditto Edgar his state of health much improved.) My wife had bitten out her two front teeth in the middle of the lower jaw, and yesterday received 4 teeth put in to replace them. These are about the only “events” that have occurred with us.

In my indisposition I can write only little, and only by fits and starts. In the meantime I pursue alotria, although even reading does not go properly with the influenza. “Upon the occasion” I have, among other things, again “done” a little astronomy “on the side”. And here I want to mention a thing that at least was new to me, but which you have perhaps already known for a long time. You know Laplace’s theory of the formation of the celestial system and how he explains the rotation of the various bodies upon themselves, etc. Proceeding from this, a Yankee, Kirkwood, has discovered a kind of law concerning the difference in the rotation of the planets, which previously appeared quite abnormal. The law is this: “The square of the number of times that each planet rotates during one revolution in its orbit is proportioned to the cube of the breadth of a diameter of its sphere of attraction.”

Between two planets, namely, there would be a point where their force of attraction acted equally; thus a body at this point would remain motionless between them. On either side of this point, on the other hand, the body would fall into the one or the other planet. This point thus forms the limit for the sphere of attraction of the planet. This sphere of attraction, in turn, is the measure of the breadth of the gaseous ring from which, according to Laplace, the planet was formed at the time of its first separation from the general gaseous mass. From this Kirkwood concluded that if Laplace’s hypothesis is true, a definite relation must exist between the velocity of the planet’s rotation and the breadth of the ring from which it was formed, or its sphere of attraction. And this he has expressed, proved by analytical calculations, in the above law.

Old Hegel makes some very good jokes about the “sudden inversion” of centripetal into centrifugal force, precisely at the moment when the one has gained the “preponderance” over the other; e.g., near the sun the centripetal force is greatest, therefore, says Hegel, the centrifugal force is greatest, since it overcomes this maximum of centripetal force, and vice versa. Furthermore, the forces are in equilibrium at the mean distance from the apsides. Hence they can never emerge from this equilibrium, etc. Incidentally, Hegel’s polemic comes down in the main to the point that Newton added nothing to Kepler, who had the “concept of motion,” by his “proofs,” which is now fairly generally acknowledged anyway.

You know that the president of the Bank of Switzerland is now Herr Karl Vogt, who betrayed his friend Fazy as soon as the latter left Geneva, and together with Reinach (the real acting director) has been up to tricks. I asked Freiligrath how Herr Vogt, who otherwise is notorious as a financier in Switzerland, came by this post of honour. Answer: The Swiss hold almost no shares any longer in the “Bank of Switzerland.” The Jews in Berlin and Frankfurt a/M decide. And these are for Vogt. Meanwhile Reinach torments our poor Freiligrath so much that the latter wrote him the virtuous word that even the Prussian police had never persecuted him so much. Fazy is said to have swindled the bank out of 1½ million francs.

Professor Beesley some weeks ago in the Fortnightly Review had an article on Catiline, in which he is vindicated as a revolutionary. There is all sorts of uncritical stuff in it (as is to be expected from an Englishman, e.g., false things about Caesar’s position at that time), but the intense rage against the oligarchy and the “respectables” is fine. Also the digs at the professional English “dull littérateur.” Herr Harrison had an article in the same Review in which it is set forth that “political economy” can bring “nothing” against communism. It seems to me that there is now more movement in English heads than in German ones. The latter are sufficiently occupied with the celebration of the Classen-Klassen-Kappelmann.

Greetings to Mrs. Lizzy. The children expect that you will not pass by London on your return.

K. M.

As to the absolute nonsense which is to be found in the Parliamentary Reports of 1857 and 1858 on banking, etc., and which I had to look at again recently, you cannot form the remotest conception. As in the monetary system, capital = gold. In between, shamefaced reminiscences from A. Smith, and abominable attempts to reconcile the gibberish of the money market with its “enlightened” notions. Most distinguished of all is M‘Culloch, who has now finally gone the way of all flesh. The fellow had obviously drawn a considerable douceur from Lord Overstone, who therefore also has to be championed through thick and thin as “facile maximus argentariorum.” I can only deliver the critique of this whole sauce in a later work.