ENGELS TO MARX” 

Manchester, 17 July 1851 

Dear Marx, 

I'll write to Klose this very day *°—I’m glad you included his 
address, which I hadn’t got. 

That you're in a pretty tight corner, I can readily conceive, and 
this is all the more vexatious as I shan’t be able to lay my hands on 
another centime until the beginning of next month. If you can’t 
wait so long, could it not be arranged for Weerth to advance you 
something until then? I can repay £5 on | August, and another 
£5 on 1 September, and that is as safe as cash. 

The newspaper subscriptions here are at last in order again, and 
thus I have at last set eyes on our old document? in the Kélnische 
Zeitung. By the way, in an otherwise apparently well-informed 
article entitled ‘Dresden’, the Augsburg paper relates that, as a 
result of browbeating during interrogation, Nothjung eventually 
made the most sweeping confessions.” However, I think it more 
than probable that skilled interrogators can soon corner him and 
get him embroiled in the wildest contradictions. A Prussian official 
is said to have gone there to squeeze still more out of him. 
Apparently the King of Hanover‘ has refused to engage in 
persecution in his domains, at least in the crude manner usual in 
Prussia, Hamburg, etc., etc. Miquel’s letter seems to bear this out. 
As you know, Martens has been arrested in Hamburg.*# 
Incidentally, nowhere has the stupidity of the Prussians been more 
in evidence than during the house search at Carl am Rhein’s, who 
was also suspected of belonging to the Communist League, and was 
found to have only letters from Raveaux! 

The only passage in the old document that could harm the 
arrested men is the one about ‘excesses’,**” all the rest is directed 
against the democrats and would aggravate their position only if 
they were to appear before a semi-democratic jury; but it seems 

a K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘Address of the Central Authority to the League, March 
1850’. - > ‘Noch umfassendere Haussuchungen in Aussicht. Umfassende Gestandnis- 
se des Schneiders Nothjung’, Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 189, 8 July 1851 (a report from 
Leipzig with reference to the Dresdner Journal und Anzeiger). - ¢ Ernst August 

likely that, if they come before a jury at all, it will be a 
hand-picked special, or federal, jury. And even these matters had 
been largely restated in the Burgers document,*** which was 
seized at the very start. In all other respects, however, it is of 
enormous advantage that the thing has been published and has 
appeared in all the newspapers. It will tremendously encourage 
the mute, isolated groups of aspiring communists of which one 
knows nothing and which, to judge by past experience, must exist 
all over Germany, and even the article in the Augsburg paper 
betrays that the thing has affected it in quite a different way from 
the first disclosures. Its arrangement of the material shows that it 
has understood the ‘madness’ only too well— en effet il n’y avait pas 
moyen de sy méprendre.’ 

Moreover, so madly and recklessly is feudal reaction galloping 
into the fray that the bogy that had been raised is not having the 
slightest effect on the bourgeoisie. It is too amusing to see how the 
K6lnische Zeitung daily preaches that il faut passer par la mer rouge 
and admits all the mistakes made by the Constitutionalists of 1848. 
But in truth, with a Kleist-Retzow as Oberprasident in Coblenz 
and with the impertinent Kreuz-Zeitung’s‘ flat jokes and doggerel 
becoming ever more insulting, what can the cultured and sober 
constitutional opposition do? It’s a pity we don’t have the 
Kreuz-Zeitung over here. I see sundry excerpts from it. You can 
have no conception of the excessively vulgar, guttersnipish, 
cretinously Prussian manner in which that rag is now belabouring 
the decent, well-to-do and respectable constitutional bigwigs. If 
fellows such as Beckerath and Co. possessed even so much as an 
ounce of self-respect and resilience, they would be bound to 
prefer the maltreatment and abuse of a Pére Duchesne, in the rude 
Rhenish manner and the entire terreur rouge," to the treatment they 
have to endure daily at the hands of the Junkers and the 
Kreuz-Zeitung. 

Then spake the donkey: ‘Furthermore 

Wesel has a councillor. 

And were I not a moke,’ quoth he, 

‘A Wesel councillor I'd be’e 
—such are the witty verses with which the Kreuz-Zeitung is now 
bespattering each of the great constitutional figures seriatim and 

a indeed, there could be no mistake about it-> the Red Sea must be 
crossed (see Exodus 13:18; 15:22). - © Neue Preussische Zeitung - 4 red terror - 
¢ ‘Kreistags-Lieder, II’, Neue Preussische Zeitung, No. 137, 17 June 1851. (In the 
original the rhyme is based on the words ‘Esel’ (donkey) and ‘Wesel’, the name of the 
councillor.) 

the fellows meekly put up with it. But it serves these dogs right, 
who once decried the best articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as 
‘vulgar abuse’, to have the difference knocked into their cowardly 
skulls. They will look back nostalgically to what was, by compari- 
son, the infinitely Attic raillery of the N.Rh.Z. 

The Willich business* is like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. 
So the ‘most popular of men’ has reached the zenith of his 
popularity and may now, as unrecognised saviour of humanity, 
console himself for the world’s ingratitude with a pot of beer and 
Schapper’s friendship. I can imagine his distress, now that the 
army of the future, the ‘nucleus’ round which the whole of 
Europe was to gather, has been destroyed. Where will the noble 
fellow find his new ‘men of principle’? 

I can’t quite make sense of the Fickler business.” Why did Lupus 
go straight to Fickler instead of first getting Liebknecht to take 
soundings, puisque celui-ce n’‘aurait compromis que lui-méme? It looks 
as though they were trying to win Fickler over. And then, after 
Lupus had been there, his letter was altogether too brutal. Either 
it was not worth taking any trouble at all with Fickler, or—after 
Ruge had been set up as a kind of lumen* during the actual 
conversation that took place between Fickler and Goegg—it would 
have been enough to break with him without doing it so 
thoroughly and brutally. It was a mean trick on Fickler’s part, c'est 
clair, but should it not have been assumed from the outset that 
South German worthies are capable of such things? And he had 
certainly made no secret of his respect for Ruge. Ruge’s 
importunity is, of course, unspeakable. But these ever new 
variations are in themselves proof enough that not one of pea 
can have any appeal whatsoever, and that the ‘comité allemand’‘ 
which Mazzini sends his Roman Epistles is still no more tee a 
figment of Ruge’s imagination. 

See to it that Weerth comes here, and write again soon. 

Your 
F. E.