London, 14 June 1853 
28 Dean Street, Soho 

Dear Frederic, 

Having been prevented by all sorts of business and domestic 
affairs, I have only today got round to replying to your two letters * 
and acknowledging receipt of the American money 
(handed over to Freiligrath),” likewise the balance of the American 
Tribune money. If that’s the sort of business relationship you and 
Charles© had with your ‘intermediary’, then you’ve been up to 
some trick for my sake. For since it was not that fellow, but you, 
who advanced the money against the bill, you and Charles could 
just as well have sent the bill to America without the fellow. At 
least, that’s how it seems to me. 

1 did not inform Pieper of your news for the following reasons: 
Pieper was becoming more and more of a wreck and some 8 or 10 
days ago I took him to task about the state of his health. It then 
transpired that his illness was going de pis en pis at the hands of 
his English quack. I therefore suggested I should take him straight 
to Bartholomew’s Hospital—the London hospital at which the 
foremost and most renowned doctors treat the public for nothing. 
He came with me. An ancient Hippocrates, after examining the 
corpus delicti and questioning him about his former TREATMENT, told 
him: “You Have BEEN A FOOL’, explaining at the same time that he would 
be ‘bown’ within three months if he did not follow his instructions 
to the letter. The efficacy of the new treatment was immediately 
apparent and in 2 weeks the man will be sain et sauf* The case was 
too serious for the treatment to be interrupted, and anyhow 
Freiligrath has a post in view for Pieper. If nothing comes of it, I 
shall let you know. 

Rumpf, our jolly tailor, is now shut up in a lunatic asylum. Some 
5 months ago, in order to extricate himself from a_ social 
quandary, le malheureux' married an elderly woman, became 
excessively respectable, foreswore all spirits and worked like a 

@ of 6 and 9 June -» See this volume, p. 323. - © Roesgen -¢ from bad to 
worse - © safe and sound - ! the wretched man 

carthorse. About a week since he took to drinking again, sent for 
me a couple of days ago, revealed that he had discovered the 
means of making the whole world happy, that I was to be his 
minister, etc., etc. He has been in the asylum since yesterday. It’s a 
pity about the fellow. 

In The Leader—which, by the by, has become a purely bourgeois 
sheet— Ruge has announced that he will be giving lectures on 
German philosophy in London.* Needless to say he takes this 
opportunity to give himself a puff. E.g. ‘Where style is concerned, 
there is only one man whom the German people set alongside 
him— Lessing.” In the same issue of The Leader, the Russian Herzen 
advertises his collected works” adding that, together with the 
Polish Committee, he is to set up a Russo-Polish propaganda press 
here in London.” 

One of the enclosed letters from Cluss**' will reveal to you the 
nature of the main blow with which Willich is threatening me. He 
refers to the £20 borrowed by me from the Refugee Committee at 
a time when I myself was distrained because my Chelsea 
landlady,” although I had paid her, had not paid her LanpLorp,— 
a debt which I repaid down to the last farthing by the necessary 
INSTALMENTS.“°? You must now advise me what tactics to adopt. If 
that’s how the good Willich thinks he’s going to do me in, he must 
be a regular ‘bonhomme’* 

Carey, the American political economist, has brought out a new 
book, Slavery at Home and Abroad. Here ‘s.avery’ covers all forms of 
servitude, WAGE-SLAVERY , etc. He has sent me his book in which he 
quotes me repeatedly (from the Tribune) now as ‘a recent English 
WRITER’, NOW aS ‘CORRESPONDENCE OF THE New-York Trisune.** As 1 have 
told you before, this man, in his earlier works, propounds the 
‘harmony of the bourgeoisie’s economic foundations and _attri- 
butes all miscuizr to unnecessary interference by the State. The 
State was his béte noire. He is now playing a different tune. All ills 
are blamed on the centralising effect of big industry. But this 
centralising effect is in turn blamed on England, who has made 
herself the workshop of the world and has forced all other countries 
to revert to brutish agriculture divorced from manufacturing. In 
its turn, responsibility for England’s sins is laid on the theory of 
Ricardo-Malthus, and specially Ricardo’s theory of rent. The 
recessary consequence both of Ricardo’s theory and of industrial 

i 

4 ‘Arnold Ruge’, The Leader, Vol. IV, No. 168, 1) June 1853. -b ‘A Russian 
Democratic Printing Office in London’, The .Leader, Vol. IV, No. 168, 11 June 
1853. - © simpleton 

centralisation would be communism. And to obviate all this, to 
counter centralisation with localisation and the union,—a union 
scattered throughout the land—of factory and farm, our ultra- 
FREE-TRADER finally recommends— protective tariffs. To obviate the 
effects of bourgeois industry, responsibility for which he lays on 
England, his recourse, as a genuine Yankee, is to speed up this 
process in America itself by artificial means. For the rest, his 
opposition to England drives him into Sismondian praise of the 
petty bourgeoisie in Switzerland, Germany, China, etc. And this is 
the chap who used to deride France for her resemblance to China. 
The only thing of definite interest in the book is the comparison 
between Negro slavery as formerly practised by the English in 
Jamaica and elsewhere, and Negro slavery in the United States. 
He demonstrates how the main stock of Negroes in Jamaica always 
consisted of freshly imported Barbarians, since their treatment by 
the English meant not only that the Negro population was not 
maintained, but also that */s of the yearly imports always went to 
waste, whereas the present generation of Negroes in America is a 
native product, more or less Yankeefied, English speaking, etc., 
and hence capable of being emancipated. 

The Tribune, needless to say, is puffing Carey’s book for all it’s 
worth.” Both, indeed, have this in common, that, in the guise of 
Sismondian-philanthropic-socialist anti-industrialism, they repres- 
ent the protectionist, ie. industrial, bourgeoisie of America. That 
is also the key to the mystery why the Tribune, despite all its ‘isms’” 
and socialist flourishes, manages to be the ‘:eapinc journal’ in the 
United States. 

Your article on Switzerland‘ was, of course, a direct swipe at the 
Tribunés ‘Leavers’ (anti-centralisation, etc.) and their man Carey. I 
continued this clandestine campaign in my first article on India," 
in which England’s destruction of native industries is described as 
revolutionary. This they will find very shocking. Incidentally the 
whole administration of India by the British was detestable and 
still remains so today. 

The stationary nature of this part of Asia, despite all the aimless 
activity on the political surface, can be completely explained by 
two mutually supporting circumstances: 1. The public works system 
of the central government and, 2. Alongside this, the entire 

@ See reviews ‘Slavery and Emancipation’ and ‘New Publications’, New-York Daily 
Tribune, No. 3771, 18 May 1853. - > An allusion to Horace Greeley’s article ‘Isms’ 
in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 3747, 20 April 1853. - ¢ F. Engels, ‘Political 
Position of the Swiss Republic’. - ¢ K. Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’. 

Empire which, apart from a few large cities, is an agglomeration 
of villages, each with its own distinct organisation and each 
forming its own small world. A parliamentary report described 
these villages as follows*: 

* ‘A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some 
100 or 1000 acres of arable and waste lands: politically viewed, it resembles a 
corporation or township. Every village is, and appears always to have been, in fact, 
a separate community or republic. Officials: 1. the Potail, Goud, Mundi) etc. as he 
is termed in different languages, is the head inhabitant, who has generally the 
superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants, 
attends to the police, and performs the duty of collecting the revenue within the 
village... 2. The Curnum, Shanboag, or Putwaree, is the register. 3. The Taliary or 
Sihulwar and 4. the Totie, are severally the watchmen of the village and of the 
crops. 5. the Neerguntee distributes the water of the streams or reservoirs in just 
proportion to the several fields. 6. The foshee, or astrologer, announces the 
seed-times and harvests, and the lucky or unlucky days or hours for all the 
operation of farming. 7. The smith, and 8. the carpenter frame the rude instruments 
of husbandry, and the ruder dwellings of the farmer. 9. The potter fabricates the 
only utensils of the village. 10. The waterman keeps clean the few garments... 11. 
The barber, 12. the silversmith, who often combines the function of village poet and 
schoolmaster. Then the Brahmin, for worship. Under this simple form of municipal 
government the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The 
boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and although the villages 
themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine and 
disease; the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same 
families, have continued for ages. The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about 
the breaking up and division of kingdoms, while the village remains entire, they 
care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves. Its 
internal economy remains unchanged.’* 

The post of Potail is mostly hereditary. In some of these 
communities the Lands Of the VILLAGE CULTIVATED IN COMMON, In most of 
them EACH OCCUPANT TILLs HIS OWN FIELD. Within the same, slavery and 
the caste system. WASTE LANDS FoR COMMON pasture. Home-weaving and 
spinning by wives and daughters. These idyllic republics, of which 
only the village boundaries are jealously guarded against neigh- 
bouring villages, continue to exist in well-nigh perfect form in the 
NORTH-WESTERN PARTS OF Inp1a only recently occupied by the English. No 
more solid basis for Asiatic despotism and stagnation is, I think, 
conceivable. And however much the English may have Irelandised 
the country, the breaking up of the archetypal forms was the 
conditio sine qua non for Europeanisation. The tax-gatherer alone 
could not have brought this about. Another essential factor was 
the destruction of the ancient industries, which robbed these 
villages of their self-supporting character. 

a Marx quotes presumably from the Fifth Report from the Select Committee on 
the Affairs of the East India Company, 1812. 

In Bali, an island off the east coast of Java, this Hindu 
organisation still intact, alongside Hindu religion, its traces, like 
those of Hindu influence, discernible all over Java. So far as the 
property question is concerned, this is a great bone of contention 
among English writers on India. In the broken mountainous 
terrain south of the Kistna, however, there appears to have been 
property in land. In Java, on the other hand, as noted in the 
History of Java by a former English governor, Sir Stamford 
Raffles, the sovereign [was] absolute landlord throughout the 
country ‘WHERE RENT TO ANY CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT WAS ATTAINABLE. At all 
events, the Mohammedans seem to have been the first in the 
whole of Asia to have established the principle of ‘no property in 
land’. 

Regarding the above-mentioned villages, I should note that they 
already feature in the Manu,*” according to which the whole 
organisation rests on them. 10 are administered by a senior 
COLLECTOR, then 100, then 1,000. 

Write soon. 

Your 
K. M.