Manchester, 2 March 1852 

Dear Marx, 

By now you will have received the £5 I sent off yesterday, half 
of it direct to you and half under cover to Lupus. My 
congratulations on the news of the illness of the old Brunswick 
inheritance-thwarter*; I trust the catastrophe will at last come to 
pass. 

According to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, Stirner’s Geschich- 
te der Reaktion is a wretched compilation, or rather a patchwork of 
gleanings from what he has read and from his own published and 
unpublished newspaper articles—‘rejected leaves and blossoms’ on 
everything in the world and somewhat more—2 volumes which 
conclude with the threat that the third will contain ‘the ground- 
work and the system’.” Far from aspiring to sacrosanctity, his own 
glosses seem rather to be destined for higher schools for young 
ladies. 

Little Simon von Trier must inevitably make an absolute ass of 
himself in Dana’s eyes by attributing such ludicrous nonsense to 
us, when Dana can see for himself that our articles contain 
ANYTHING BUT THAT. It is preposterous of Dana not to send us the 
Tribune or you the money; I think the best plan would be to set 
Weydemeyer onto him, he at least would be able to send us the 
Tribune and at the same time settle the money question by word 
a Heinrich Georg von Westphalen -> Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 56, 25 February 
1852, supplement: ‘Buchmacherei’. - © See this volume, pp. 37 and 43-44. 

of mouth. Whether he advises you of a business house in London 
or sends a bill of exchange is immaterial. My article, which was to 
have gone by the Southampton steamer, missed it since I had 
miscalculated its departure by one day. Now you will be getting it 
on Friday, along with another which will bring the thing up to the 
end of 1848.* These will be followed by the Prussian Chambers, 
the campaign for the Imperial Constitution” and, finally, the 
Prusso-Austrian squabbles of 1850/51, lastly the conclusion— 
altogether the whole may, perhaps, run to another six-8 articles, 
summa summarum 17-20 articles. 

Charles” will be back here in a fortnight, when I shall have 
more time. Until then Jones will have to be patient. 

So Mr Derby declares outright that, a la Sir James Graham, he 
will again help the Austrians and Co. to lay their hands on any 
likely bandieras.”* Hence once again letters will be broken open en 
masse. The main sufferers will be Mazzini and the Hungarians. We 
ourselves will be little inconvenienced. 

But what effrontery on Derby’s part! ‘I hereby declare that 
given a suitable opportunity, I shall impose a tax on corn. Just 
when that will be is for me alone to decide. But if you, the 
majority in the House of Commons, do not wish to be des factieux, 
you must leave me in peace until I have so far consolidated my 
position and so far toryfied the land that I can undo unperturbed 
all that has been accomplished during the past twenty years.’¢ 
Poor House or Commons! In place of a ministry that found itself in a 
relative minority, they now have one that is in absolute and 
permanent minority; and they are not even permitted to oppose it. 
But those milksops, the Free Traders, have got no more than their 
deserts. The fellows won a battle, captured a new strategic line, 
and failed to occupy and fortify it, failed, indeed, to profit by their 
victory and even merely to pursue the enemy. Now they must 
again join battle on the same ground. The Tory avénement, 
however, has suddenly made these questions abundantly plain to 
the fellows. Parliamentary reform, taken to the point at which 
Tories and Whigs, at least in their unadulterated form, are for 
ever precluded from power and a majority of industrialists in the 
Cabinet and in Parliament is assured, has now become a vital 
question to the manufacturers. Here these GENTLEMEN are again very 
active. At this moment the Anti-Corn Law League ” is meeting 
and discussing whether to reorganise itself. Cobden, Bright, 

4 F. Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, XII and XIII. - 
> Roesgen - © sedition-mongers - 4 Engels ridicules Derby’s speech in the House of 
Lords on 27 February published in The Times, No. 21050, 28 February 
1852. - © accession 

Milner Gibson, etc., are here. No doubt they will at least piece 
together again the bare bones of the organisation. But not until 
the dissolution will the real fun begin. The dissolution, however, 
cannot be long in coming for, despite Derby’s honied words and 
his ‘pacific and conciliatory intentions, clashes are unavoidable. 
Unfortunately there is little prospect of the commercial crisis 
coinciding with the dissolution. Business here continues splendid. 
The news from America is exceedingly favourable. What is staving 
off the crisis, and may continue to stave it off for a little while 
longer, is 1. California, both the Trave it provides and the masses 
of gold coming into circulation, as well as emigration thither, in 
short, all the stimulus that California exerts upon the whole of the 
United States; 2. the curb imposed by the high cotton prices of 
1849 and 1850 upon the cotton industry which did not expe- 
rience brisk progress until the spring of 1851; 3. the enormous 
fall in cotton prices—almost 50%—during the past eighteen 
months. In New Orleans the price of cotton (middling— the average 
kind) on 1 Sept. 1850 was 13'/. cents=7*/4d in Liverpool; today 
the price of mipunc in New Orleans is 7°/s cents=47/sd in 
Liverpool, and for a time it stood at 7 cents. Obviously this is 
bound to bring about a considerable increase in consumption. Last 
year—Jan. and Feb.—here in the cotton district, 29,000 bales 
_ were consumed weekly, this year 33,000 and that solely American; 
in addition there is Surat, Egyptian, etc.*—If things continue thus, 
England will consume 800-850 million pounds of ‘cotton this year; 
4. the: general timidity to speculate and to launch .with any 
persistent enthusiasm even into gold mines and steamships. From 
everything I see I should say that another 6 months of such 
intensive production as at present would suffice to inundate the 
whole world; if another 4 months or so be allowed for the goods 
to reach their destination and positive news of over-supply to 
come back, as also for an interim period of reflection before 
people are seized by panic,—then the most likely time for the 
onset of the crisis will be somewhere between Nov. 1852 and Feb. 
1853. But all this is cuzss-work and we could just as well have it in 
September. It should, though, be a fine how-d’ye-do, for never 
before has such a mass of goods of all descriptions been pushed 
onto the market, nor have there ever been such colossal means of 
production. The foolish encineers' strike” will hold it up for at least 
a month; virtually no machines are being made now and they are 

a Engels takes statistical data from ‘The Spirit of the Annual Trade Circulars. The 
Year That Is Past’, The Economist, No. 437, 10 January 1852. 

very much in demand. Hibbert, Platt and Sons have hundreds of 
orders from both here and abroad, not one of which they can, of 
course, execute. And when this commercial thunderstorm 
moreover breaks over Mr Derby’s head, it will be bad for him! 

The last balance sheet made my old man really hopping mad 
for it shows him as having lost money, despite the general 
prosperity, and he is likely to give notice of termination (i.e. of his 
corporate contract with the Ermens). In which case this business 
will probably shut down as early as next year. The chaos arising 
out of all these goings-on has now reached a peak, and is partly 
why I have such a mass of things to do. 

Don’t bother to send me Ewerbeck’s book. It’s not worth the 6d 
the postage would cost. 

My warm regards to your wife and children. 

Your 
BE.