MARX TO ENGELS” 

[London,] 1 August 1856 
28 Dean Street, Soho 

Dear E., 

The £5 note most gratefully received but not as yet the letter 
you promised me. Herewith a letter from the crazy Mirbach, 
which I have received—via Berlin! 

No money from Sheffield yet. Today I got Pieper to send a 
dunning letter. Meanwhile there has been the following incident: 
Yesterday Urquhart’s bulldog—the celebrated Collet— appeared at 
my house. He had come, he said, at the behest of the Grand Coph- 
ta’? himself. Urquhart was *very sorry, regretted, indeed, very 

a black care 

much that Mr Ironside had interfered at all with my articles etc., 
which he thought of extraordinary value etc.* Then he asked me to 
tell him how the matter had come about. *Mr Urquhart imagined 
that the principal cause of the quarrel was the suppression of 
some parts of the copy etc.* I then told him what had happened 
and showed him the written corpora delicti.? Next, he asked me 
*whether I was willing to enter upon any compromise, which 
question I flatly denied, telling him that I was no penny-a-liner 
and not to be treated like the London literary vagabonds.* It 
seemed he was only awaiting this statement in order to tell me 
with EXTRAORDINARY SOLEMNITY that Urquhart thought The Free Press 
‘inadequate’. * Mr Ironside was placed on the horns of a dilemma 
because The Free Press was, indeed, but an extract from the 
Sheffield Free Press—a paper, by the bye, twice the dimensions of 
the F. P—and what was suited to the wants of the readers of the 
Sh. F. P. was not all palatable to the readers of the F. P. and vice 
versa. Mr Urquhart had, therefore, resolved upon starting in 
about a month a diplomatic journal at London.* He hoped that I 
would let him have the whole of the Revelations and not bear 
him a Grupce. I returned a vague answer capable of being 
construed in the affirmative but leaving me free—if the conditions 
should prove too poor or the paper too crazy-—-to refuse. It 
will all depend on the nature of the paper. In London things are 
rather different from Sheffield, and, should Urquhart come out 
with his counter-revolutionary nonsense in such a way that 
collaboration with him would discredit me in the eyes of the 
revolutionaries here, I would be obliged, *of course, hard as it 
would be under the present miserable circumstances,* to decide 
against it. However, nous verrons.” At all events I have now received 
adequate satisfaction as regards my LITERARY POINT OF HONOUR, in aS 
much as the chief has all but disowned his treutenant. This is a 
satisfactory dénouement, if only on account of Bucher and the 
democratic riff-raff. 

There will now be much wrangling within the Urquhartite camp 
itself. It seemed to me that they evinced a bad TENDENcy to make a 
scapegoat Of poor Cyples. E.g., Collet said he wasn’t sure whether it 
was with Ironside’s knowledge that Cyples had sent me the 
former’s letter. To this I replied that Cyples seemed to be an 
honest fellow who had heard ‘secret diplomacy so greatly decried 
that he naturally assumed ‘rustic piptomacy to be the rule at the 
F. P. orrice, 

a pieces of evidence - > we shall see 

Received a letter today from my wife. She seems greatly affected 
by the old lady’s* death. She will have to spend a week or 10 days 
in Trier in order to put up for auction what little in the way of 
effects her mother has left and to share the proceeds with Edgar.” 
She has proposed the following scheme: After spending a few 
days more in the vicinity of Trier with a woman friend of hers, 
she will travel to Paris and thence direct to Jersey, having decided 
that we ought to spend September and October there. First, so 
that she herself can recuperate; secondly, because it’s cheaper and 
pleasanter than London and, finally, so that the children should 
learn French, etc. She doesn’t, of course, know anything about 
what has been taking place here. For the present I have written to 
say that it’s a splendid scheme, although I cannot in fact see how it 
can be put into effect. Yesterday I again saw the New-York Tribune 
(weekly). The whole paper is filled with nothing but the ELECTORAL 
popce and so it will be for months to come. We cannot hope 
seriously to tackle the N.-Y. T. until the presidential business is 
over. 

Salut. 
Your 

K. M. 

P.S. At Blind’s, saw 2 volumes of Simon of Trier’s émigré 
jeremiad.© Watered-down twaddle, every other word a solecism, 
callow botchery, weak-kneed affectation, foppish naive pretension, 
a mess of Griinian Jew’s ears in beggar’s broth, one long 
platitude—nothing of the kind has ever before appeared in print. 
All that was needed to give the ‘German Parliament’“ the final 
kick in the arse was this self-exposure on the part of one of its 
heroes. Needless to say, I did no more than leaf through it. I'd 
sooner swill soap-suds or hobnob with Zoroaster over mulled cow’s 
piss than read through all] that stuff. He and Co. are perpetually 
haunted by our ghost. L. Blanc, Blanqui, Marx and Engels are his 
Unholy Quadrinity which he never forgets. We two—the pro- 
pounders of ‘equal economic rights’—are said inter alia to have 
advocated ‘Armed (!) appropriation of capital’, Even the jokes we 
cracked about Switzerland in the Revue ‘fill him with indignation’. 
‘No Civil List, no standing army, no millionaires, no beggars’ *— 

a Caroline von Westphalen - > Edgar von Westphalen, Jenny Marx’s brother 
- ¢ L. Simon, Aus dem Exil, Bd. 1-2. - 4 Paraphrased quotation from Engels’ “The 
Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution’ published in the Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung. Politisch-dkonomische Revue (see present edition, Vol. 10, p. 177). 

4* 

‘Marx and Engels hope that Germany will never sink to such 
depths of degradation’. It’s exceedingly odd, the way he speaks of 
us in the singular—‘Marx and Engels says’, etc.