London, around 14 June 1853
(Excerpts)

On the other hand, a reply must be made, and third parties can do this best. You need then not scruple to enter into a private arrangement and to impart some telling “anecdota” to the brutal democratic “heart”.

[...] With regard to the Reform, I advise you, besides prudence, *une modération extrême*. This wisdom-shitting philistine, who in Hesse – and Hesse was his world – represented nothing but the demiurge of this his world – the stay-at-home; and who now gives himself the air of having from the very beginning represented the proletariat on a “materialist basis” – this smiling nothing, who “highlights” his cleverness and peculiar prudence vis-à-vis the parties that overstep the mark with Solomonic maxims – this embodied marginal gloss to “Heyse’s Correspondences”; accordingly, this fellow naturally does not interest me and disgusts me. But you helped to make the paper. It appears in New York. – Half Germany is coming to New York for the Exhibition. You have no other paper in New York. Would it not, therefore, be impolitic to give up Kellner and the paper? In the end you do these fellows a favour. Act naive. Keep writing; you can do him no greater harm. Do not emancipate him from influences that, as can be seen from everything, have already been a damned nuisance to him. Do it like the Prussian citizens. The government and its Manteuffel vainly torment themselves to get rid of these citizens’ friendship. These citizens pretend to believe in the constitutionality of their government, and *le gouvernement est constitutionnel malgré lui-même*: that is worldly wisdom. – The *New England Zeitung* is and remains equally unreliable. Herr Schläger, a student, full of shallowness, know-better (*à la* Kellner “*le mieux est le plus grand ennemi du bien*”) in presumptuous vapidity. He wrote to Pieper that I should write for the *N.E.Z.* on the necessary transition from bourgeois to communist mode of production. – Citizen Marx, with his “schematising and arranging” intellect, suited to this task assigned him by Citizen Schläger; but Citizen Marx must “give up his abstract language” and show how all, etc. Good citizen Schläger, who at the same time writes to Pieper not to attack (he regularly crosses this out for him) citizens Ruge and Heinzen, since the “élite of his readers” (conclude as to the rest) are Heinzenites and the *N.E.Z.* (literally) is destined to take on the legacy of Janus readers. Great citizen Schläger! Greatest Pompey! Nonetheless I have advised Pieper to keep writing for Schläger. *Le motif est très simple*: We do our enemies no favour when we write for them. *Tout au contraire*. We can play no worse trick on them.