Manchester, 4 August 1856 

Dear Marx, 

The letter that didn’t arrive must have melted in the heat. I 
don’t know whether you down there too have suddenly been 
assailed by this tropical heat which has brought everything to a 
standstill, apart from the continuous sluicing and bathing of the 
outer man with water and the inner man with a variety of other 
fluids. Yesterday I was totally incapable of anything and barely in 
a condition to go out. I haven’t stopped sweating since Thursday, 
even in my bath; and the sordid work at the office is so exhausting 
that afterwards one feels utterly down. Moreover the nights are 
equally stifling. 

It’s most satisfactory that the Urquhart business should have 
turned out as it did.* There’s no doubt that what most impresses 
the rabble is our resolute manner. I hope it will be possible for the 
pieces” to appear in Urquhart’s thing, nous verrons< 

I’m daily awaiting a letter from my mater summoning me to 
London. I am arranging matters in such a way as to be able to 
leave on Saturday, should the summons come. I shall be moving 
out of here on Saturday though I haven’t yet taken new lodgings, 

@ See previous letter. - > K. Marx, Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th 
Century. - © we shall see 

and still don’t know whether I shall do so or spend a week 
knocking about, since I intend on my return to engage in all kinds 
of mad escapades. 

My brother-in-law * has been here—a good chap, communist out 
of principle, bourgeois out of interest, as he himself most naively 
puts it, but he always uses ‘we’ when referring to communist 
matters; tried to talk me into making tentative approaches to the 
Prussians about an amnesty, whereupon I, of course, gave a very 
determined answer and finally he, too, saw that 1. I couldn’t do 
so, and 2. that the Prussians would tell me to shove it, etc—The 
man seemed to have few illusions about my frame of mind and 
certainly had even fewer when he left. However, he was very 
surprised to find me so cheerful. 

I shall write to Mirbach as soon as it gets a little cooler; it’s too 
much to expect just now. 24 degrees Réaumur is no joke when 
one has to traipse round in clothes proper to the Exchange. 

If the Jersey scheme can be carried out—it certainly has its 
good points and is not entirely impossible—make sure that while 
in Paris, your wife finds out exactly how things stand regarding 
route and communications, for otherwise she might get into 
serious difficulties. I believe that Saint-Malo is the only place in 
France to which steamers go from Jersey. Get one or two of the 
crapauds*' to tell you what the position is. After all, you know 
several who have been there. 

You can give the great Pieper my assurance that I read his great 
‘filtered’ article on Spain in The People’s Paper before the original 
appeared in the Tribune, ‘wanc rrr C'est beau.* By the way, the P. P. 
deserves to be relegated to the w.c. Just consider this stinker: we 
REGRET TO LEARN THAT LORD SO AND SO HAS CUT HIS FINGER, etc. You really 
must get Jones to give his sus-eprror a damned good dressing-down 
for permitting such drivel. 

On no account let the rabble in Sheffield sit on the money— 

they'll have to shell out in any case. vie 

F. E.