[London,] 27 June 1851 

Dear Hans, 

I am not at all sure whether I am doing the right thing in 
sending you a letter with Fabricius. What assurance have I that 
this man won’t be nabbed at the border, since he is letting people 
here burden him with a veritable valiseful of letters? 

As your proposed American plan—Engels may have already 
written to you about this*—has come to n. thing, you will have no 
alternative but to come and reinforce us here. Something might 
even turn up that would enable us to collaborate—for payment, of 
course, car il faut vivre. 

I have now heard from a reliable source that betrayal and 
denunciation are playing a part in the arrests of our friends. I am 
morally convinced that Messrs Willich and Schapper and their 
good-for-nothing pack of rascally curs are directly taking part in 
this infamy. You will appreciate how important it is to these ‘great 
men’ in partibus’ to remove such people in Germany as they 
believe to be directly in the way of their accession to the throne. 
The jackasses fail to comprehend that we regard them as jackasses 
and accord them at best our disdain. 

Despite his respectably high-minded, broth-without-bread, non- 
commissioned officer’s moral hypocrisy, Willich is a thoroughly 
common, mark well, theroughly common chevalier d’industrie, pillier 
destaminet*’ and—or so I am told by a respectable philistine, 
though I cannot myself vouch for it—also cardsharper. The lad 
loafs around all day at the pub, a democratic pub, naturally, where 
he drinks gratis, bringing customers in lieu of payment and 
entertaining them with his stereotyped phrases about a future 
revolution in which the chevalier himself no longer believes, so 
often has he reiterated them under such widely disparate 
circumstances, and always with the same result. The fellow is a 
parasite of the basest kind—invariably, of course, under patriotic 
pretences. 

a See this volume, p. 373. - > for one has to live - © in partibus infidelium - in parts 
inhabited by infidels. Here: abroad, far from the fray - 4 adventurer, pillar of the 
taproom 

All this individual’s communism amounts to is a determination 
to tread the primrose path, always at the public expense, in 
communion with other footloose chevaliers. This man’s activities 
consist solely in gossiping and lying about us in pubs, and boasting 
of connections in Germany which, though non-existent, are 
nevertheless taken for gospel by the Central clown A. Ruge,**° the 
ideological boor Heinzen and by the stagey, coquettish, theologis- 
ing belletrist Kinkel, connections of which he also boasts to the 
French. 

Apropos, while this last-named sanctimonious Adonis runs off 
his legs in bourgeois cercles, permitting himself to be fed, cosseted, 
etc., etc., by them, he associates secretly and illicitly with Schapper 
and Willich in order to keep in touch with the ‘Workers’ Party’ as 
well. This lad would greatly like to be all things to all men. In 
every respect he bears a most striking resemblance to Frederick 
William IV who is nothing more than a Kinkel enthroned and is 
afflicted with the same rhetorical leucorrhoea. 

Were you to ask me how you are to subsist here, my answer 
would be: follow in the footsteps of the doughty Willich. He 
sows not neither does he reap, and yet the heavenly Father feeds 
him.* 

But now au sérieux! If living in Germany is becoming too 
dangerous for you, it might be good for you to come here. If you 
could remain in Germany unmolested, that would, of course, be 
preferable, since it’s more useful to have people there than here. 

Your 
K. M. 

Apropos, Britain’s overseas trade amounts to at least ‘/; of its 
entire trade—more, since the repeal of the corn duties.?” There 
is, by the by, no sense at all in Mr Christ’s arguments.” Pinto‘ has 
already pointed out that, if '°/\g are necessary to something, the 
final '/\o is as important as the previous °/,). Granted that Britain’s 
overseas trade amounts to only ‘/, (which is wrong), there can be 
no doubt that without that, the other 37/, would not exist, and still 
less the */, which alone can produce the numeral 1. 

a Matthew 6:26. - > The original has: Christmann. Marx refers to A. Christ, Ueber 
den gegenwartigen Stand der Frage der Schutzzélle. - © 1. Pinto, Traité de la circulation et 
du crédit. 

The democrats have long been accustomed to miss no opportun- 
ity of compromising themselves, making themselves ridicules, and 
risking their own skins. But never has the impotence of the 
infiniment petits* succeeded in demonstrating itself so strikingly as 
in the paper which the local Central democrats—Ruge, Haug, 
Ronge, etc.—are bringing out. Under the presumptuous title Der 
Kosmos (or Das Kosmos as Freiligrath aptly calls it)” there appears a 
weekly scrawl the like of which, in its brazen and_ insipid 
insignificance, the German language—and that is saying a great 
deal—has never, perhaps, produced before. Not even one of 
little-German democratic parish magazines has ever brought forth 
such evil-smelling wind as this. 

It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a 
few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to moulder 
away. Untalented as our governments may be, they are veritable 
lumina mundi‘ as compared with these bumptious mediocre 
jackasses. 

Adieu! 

I am usually at the British Museum from 9 in the morning until 
7 in the evening. The material I am working on is so damnably 
involved that, no matter how I exert myself, I shall not finish for 
another 6-8 weeks. There are, moreover, constant interruptions of 
a practical kind, inevitable in the wretched circumstances in which 
we are vegetating here. But for all that, for all that,’ the thing is 
rapidly approaching completion. There comes a time when one 
has forcibly to break off. The democratic simpterons to whom 
inspiration comes ‘from above’ need not, of course, exert 
themselves thus. Why should these people, born under a lucky 
star, bother their heads with economic and historical material? It’s 
really all so simple, as the doughty Willich used to tell me. All so 
simple to these addled brains!—Ultra-simple fellows!