[Manchester,] 27 June 1851 

Dear Marx, 

It is very bonasse” of the good Saxon police actually to inform us 
themselves of what we did not previously know or could not have 
discovered. Burgers’ didactically dignified circular letter with the 

4 See this volume, pp. 489-90. - > kindly 

familiar clair-obscur* of its reasoning must have cost them much 
fruitless brain-racking**; they even picked out all the wrong 
passages for printing in bold. A pretty figure the great Windmil- 
lers” cut now, thrown out of their own party before the eyes of the 
whole world, the great Willich bracketed with Haude, Gebert and 
other such unknown rabble, with a certain ‘Schopper’ (derived 
from ‘Schoppen’)© whose rare services are so little known that 
even in Cologne they can’t print his name correctly! So Far ALL RIGHT. 
But Article 1 of the Rules bodes ill for the arrested men: ‘all 
methods of revolutionary activity’, or however it goes.’ It 
removes the business from the sphere of mere prohibited 
association to that of high treason. To judge, by the way, from an 
allusion in the Kölnische Zeitung, 1 would seem to be right in 
supposing that the intention is to arraign the whole company in 
Berlin before the State tribunal which is to be brought into being 
specifically for this grandiose occasion. 

The utter failure of the government's attempt to make a bogy 
out of the great Dresden disclosure augurs well for the mood of 
the bourgeoisie. So little terror does the red spectre now hold for 
the bourgeois that he refuses to listen to talk of a big communist 
plot and is already beginning to fear that the system of house 
searches will ere long be extended to himself. 

Not a single paper has taken the bait and the government’s 
frantic endeavour to discover further machinations in gymnastic 
societies, ‘free communities’*”? and among democratically-min- 
ded master tailors proves, on the one hand, how much it is vexed 
by the indifference of the bourgeoisie whose curiosity it is seeking 
to whet, and, on the other, how little the Rules and the circular 
letter have led to further disclosures. It would seem that Miquel’s 
house also was searched in vain. 

Qu’y a-t-il de nouveau à Londres?* 

Your 
F. E.