Karl Marx to Adolf Cluss
in Washington
London, July 30, 1852
(Excerpts)

The letter from Huzel was received with Homeric laughter. It gave rise to the following intermezzos:

“5 Sutton Str., Soho, Office of ‘the People’s Paper’

To Herr Dr Johann Gottfried Kinkel

I am informed that at Cincinnati, before Anneke or other Germans, you ventured the following utterance: ‘Marx and Engels etc.’ (there follows the treasonable passage).

I expect your reply by return. Silence will be regarded as an admission.

Dr. Karl Marx”

This note was purposely kept so vague: “am informed,” “Anneke or other Germans,” etc., in order to leave Herr Kinkel room for ambiguous turns of phrase. By return there appeared the following reply:

“1 Henstridge Villas, St John’s Wood, 24 July 1852.

To Herr Dr Karl Marx

Since the article about me which was published under your auspices during my imprisonment, I have had nothing more to do with you. If you believe you can prove, through testimony by Annekes or other men of honour and not through anonymous insinuation, that I have said or published anything untrue that is injurious to your honour and that of Herr Engels, then I must refer you, as I would anyone with whom I have no personal or political contact, to the ordinary path which the law opens to all against insult or libel. Outside this path I shall deal with you no further.

Gottfried Kinkel”

The last stroke I did not manage to reproduce from the original. N’est-ce pas? Very cunning. I am supposed to go to an English court for insults that occurred in Cincinnati. And what a cool rejection of anything that could look like a duel and the like!

Since I had to assume that the worthy Gottfried Kinkel, who drops the “Johann” in public, would refuse further letters with the Soho postmark, I resorted to the following ruse. I had the address of the letter written by Ernest Jones, and the letter itself was posted by Lupus from Windsor, where he had business. Inside the envelope Gottfried found a tender little billet-doux, the margin adorned with a colour-printed posy of forget-me-nots and roses, of the following content:

“24 July 1852.
5 Sutton Str., Soho,
Office of ‘the People’s Paper’

To Herr Dr Johann etc. Kinkel

Collated
with a written statement, lying before me, by your guarantor Huzel,
from whom you cowardly exacted his word of honour at Cincinnati to keep silent about your mendacious gossip uttered there—a promise, however, that was only given conditionally by Huzel—
with a letter written some time [before] by Herr Dr Gottfried Kinkel with his own hand to his ex-guarantor Cluss, likewise lying before me, in which the selfsame Kinkel boasts of political connections he wished to enter into with me,
your letter—and it was provoked precisely for this purpose—furnishes fresh striking proof that the said Kinkel is a base as well as cowardly priest.
Dr Karl Marx.”

The latter Herr “Johann etc.” pockets with self-satisfaction, and it is now circulating among the ranks of the emigration. Kinkel will only notice the main joke later, when the first issue of the “Great Men of the Exile” has appeared. For I allowed myself the jest, shortly before this terrible attack upon Gottfried, of insulting him directly and personally once more, and at the same time of presenting myself as “justified” in the eyes of the emigration blockheads. For that I needed something “black on white” from Johann etc.

Now great things—namely, Mazzini has been running about like mad for some days, trying to bring about a union of all the official elements of the local bourgeois emigration. He also went to Johann etc. And the following has come to pass. Mazzini, Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin and Kinkel form the executive power of Europe. Each member of this authority has the right to add 2 subjects of his nation. However, the decision on these additions is made by the majority among the 4 originals, hence Mazzini. Consequently, among the Germans, A. Ruge and A. Gögg will be added. Who else among the other nationalities I do not yet know. Kinkel for his part is said to have posed 2 conditions:
1) to demand 20,000 dollars for his loan. The latter I believe to be a lie. 2) the continued, independent existence of the Kinkel-Willich finance committee, etc. This is merely a formal homage to Willich; for in truth it has already been agreed to transfer the entire loan money to A. Gögg. Finally, Kinkel et Co. will most submissively recognise the Revolutionary League in America.

This is the latest turn. To what point the conclusion of this important agreement has been reached, or whether they are still lingering at the preliminaries, I don’t know. In any case, the affair must be spread in America, and in doing so the following is to be particularly emphasised. At the last meeting of guarantors in London, May 1852, when the Kinkel-Willich committee was definitively elected, Kinkel declared most solemnly on his word of honour that if A. Ruge were elected to the committee, he would resign, for he would never sit on a committee with a man who had openly declared him “an agent of the Prince of Prussia.” — Secondly: What will Weitling et Co. say when the dollars drummed up by Kinkel in America are spent by the finance minister A. Gögg—and this is intended, in order to support the Janus of “K. Heinzen” and to put into circulation the immortal articles of Ruge, Heinzen, etc.?

As for Mazzini, this crafty enthusiast is daily sinking more into an Italian “Gustav Struve” or the like. For 4 years he has been screaming “action, action.” Now it happens that the Austrian police in Italy seize 600 Mazzinists who conduct their correspondence on handkerchiefs with chemical ink. Since these people do not wish to be hanged and have extensive family connections, Herr Mazzini receives a letter from Italy: now they want to get serious with “action” and strike. All at once, in the bombastic man of action the “reflective understanding” awakens post festum, and he conjures them for God’s sake to remain quiet, as they could do nothing alone, the country was swamped with foreign soldiers, and similar commonplaces, which have neither gained nor lost in truth since 1849. Action, action! Italia farà da sé!—Lupus met an Italian from Mazzini’s committee a few days ago and pointed out to him these most absurd things. “What,” replied the Roman, “more than 600 men fall in a single battle.” But because the Italians fear being hanged, shot or imprisoned by and by, and one or another of the victims of his declamation sends relatives to London, the man of action fears being stabbed to death by a blinded, infuriated countryman through misunderstanding, and changes his night quarters every evening, under the pretext of having to hide from the Austrians. Yet it is not Austrians, it is “blinded” Italians from whom he takes refuge wretchedly. Does this anti-pope not deserve the gallows? To hunt, to mock, to weary a nation in this way. The necessary result, especially with a people like the Italian, is terribly passive hangover, complete collapse.

Yesterday our people were to appear before the jury in Cologne, when suddenly another adjournment is declared, because one of the witnesses for the prosecution, Police Councillor Schulze in Berlin, is ill. So if Herr Schulze were to die, the accused could sit in pre-trial detention until the Day of Judgment. Meanwhile Becker is going blind and Daniels is becoming consumptive. C’est par trop infâme. The most contemptible role in this is played by the bourgeois press.

The notice of the adjournment I have from the K[ölnische] Z[eitung]. A few days earlier I received the following report from Cologne.

“On Becker’s arrest, the following letters of yours were seized: of — ’51, -y- ’51 and — ’51. In the last the following passages have been singled out by the prosecution as particularly aggravating: ‘Enclosed the cheerful scrawl from the school of Kinkel. F.d.B. has been collected here, 15 sh. — 10 sh. are still missing, which were also subscribed but have not yet been drummed up. I shall proceed in the way you indicated. Debit me then with £1 5 sh., which indeed, given the deteriorated circumstances of the member who is to pay it, cannot be drummed up.’ From the letters F. d. B. the prosecution makes ‘For the League’ (‘Für den Bund’), whereas Becker interprets them as an abbreviation for a connection which was entered into between him and you for the procurement of cheap books for you in London. That passage forms a main point of the indictment, since against B[Becker] there is otherwise almost nothing or only artificially assembled material. Then the indictment begins in the year 1831 and traces the origin of the Communist League from an association of Germans in Paris, which underwent various modifications under the names ‘League of Germans,’ ‘League of the Just,’ but continued uninterruptedly up to the present accused society. The notes seem to have been taken from information furnished by the Hanoverian government. The indictment attaches no importance at all to the split in London in 1850, because, in its opinion, this was only a personal squabble, whereas all the people pursued the same criminal aim and had the same tendencies, and at the decisive moment would go hand in hand. Thus, in addition to the two addresses previously communicated in the papers, a 3rd has also been woven into the indictment, which is dated June or July 1850 and is said to have been intercepted in Leipzig. — The only significant statements are those of the witness Haupt, who furnishes a very extensive detailed narrative, and of the witness Hentze, an ex-lieutenant, who attacks Becker somewhat. On Saturday, under the same charge, Erhard, cashier at banker Stein’s, was locked up. He is said to be superficially compromised by a recommendation given to Nothjung and a couple of letters found at the latter’s, which allow one to conclude a mutual understanding. ... Moreover, such a neat selection of jurors has been made that the state authorities, with a view to possible chances, could not be better placed.”

The most important political news is the treaty concluded by Prussia, Austria and Russia during the Tsar’s presence in Vienna. The Morning Chronicle first published it the day before yesterday. Yesterday the Times printed it, and so you will be able to read it yourself.

Here the elections have turned out in such a way that the Tories, who will drop the Corn Question, possess a large counter-revolutionary majority in the rest, and I think this cabinet will only yield to a more or less revolutionary manifestation. The Messrs. Bourgeois now realise what a blunder they committed in neglecting, since 1846, to draw also the political consequences of their Anti-Corn victory. Ils y penseront. My errata list for the “Brumaire” is just about mouldering away; had I but known this, I should now have used the money thus expended to pay your postage. But as Spinoza taught, it is comforting to regard all things sub specie aeterni.