Manchester, 29 February 1860 
6 Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road 

Dear Freiligrath, 

Your letter really warmed my heart, for there are very few 
people with whom I strike up a friendship, but when I do I 
adhere to it. My friends of 1844 continue to be my friends today. 
As to the strictly official part of your letter, however, this is based 
on some grave misapprehensions, hence the following by way of 
clarification: 

1. The Eichhoff-Stieber case™* 

The ‘material’ which I passed on to Juch (on which occasion I 
also pointed out to him that there were two reasons why he and 
Eichhoff did not deserve my support: firstly, the way in which they 
had referred to the Cologne trial? in the Hermann?; secondly, my 
conviction that Eichhoff is simply a tool of the ex-police official 
Duncker, who is seeking to avenge himself on Stieber as Vidocq 
once did on Gisquet in Paris; nevertheless, I would, I said, do all 
in my power to help overthrow Stieber and bring him to book, if 
only to avenge the death of my friend, Dr Daniels), this ‘material’, 
I say, amounts to the following: 

* [K. Eichhoff,] ‘Stieber’, Hermann, Nos. 36-38, 40, 42, 43; 10, 17, 24 September, 
8, 22, 29 October 1859. : 

I gave Juch a copy of the Revclations Concerning the Communist 
Trial in Cologne; N. B. this publication of mine, which was printed 
first in Switzerland and later in Boston, was cited by Vogt as a 
well-known book, and was in no sense ‘something secret’. 

I told Juch that it contained all I knew. 

Finally, I pointed out to him that Lewald (Eichhoff’s defence 
counsel) must examine Hirsch, who was in jail in Hamburg, as a 
witness. This was done. Hirsch has now admitted on oath that the 
‘minute-book’ was a Prussian fabrication and an indictable offence 
in every other respect. 

Hence the ‘revelations’ produced by the trial, thanks to my 
‘material’, exonerate the former members of the League™ from any 
semblance of legal culpa* and ‘expose’ the Prussian police system, 
which, once installed as a result of the ‘Cologne trial’ and the 
infamous pusillanimity of the Cologne jury, grew to be such a 
power in Prussia that it has finally become intolerable to the 
bourgeois themselves and even to Auerswald’s ministry. Voila tout.” 

Besides, [’'m astonished that you could even imagine that I might 
hand the police anything on a platter. I would remind you of 
letters sent from Cologne (1849-50),''? which you knew about and 
in which I was reproached in so many words with having dragged 
my feet too much (at the time, I did so for very good reasons, 
certainly not out of concern for myself) in regard to agitation by 
the League. 

2. My lawsuit against the ‘National-Zeitung’ 

I would point out d’abord* that, after the ‘League’ had been 
disbanded at my behest in November 1852, 1 never belonged to any 
society again, whether secret or public; that the party, therefore, in 
this wholly ephemeral sense, ceased to exist for me 8 years ago. 
The lectures on political economy I gave, after the appearance of 
my book“ (in the autumn of 1859), to a few picked working men, 
amongst whom were also former members of the League, had 
nothing in common with an exclusive society—less even than, say, 
Mr Gerstenberg’s lectures to the Schiller Committee.” 

You will recall that the leaders of the fairly ramified Communist 
Club in New York''' (among them Albrecht Komp, manacer of the 
General Bank, 44 Exchange Place, New York) sent me a letter, 
which passed through your hands, and in which it was tentatively 
suggested that I should reorganise the old League. A whole year 
passed before I replied,''” and then it was to the effect that since 

* guilt - > That is all. - © first -¢ A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 

1852 I had not been associated with any association and was firmly 
convinced that my theoretical studies were of greater use to the 
working class than my meddling with associations which had now 
had their day on the Continent. Because of this ‘inactivity’ I was 
thereupon repeatedly and bitterly attacked, if not by name at least 
by inference, in Mr Scherzer’s London Neue Zeit. 

When Mr Levy came over from Dusseldorf (for the first time), 
on which occasion he frequently called on you, too, he actually 
proffered me a factory operatives’ insurrection, no less, in 
Iserlohn, Solingen, etc. J told him bluntly that I was against such 
futile and dangerous folly. I further informed him that I no longer 
belonged to any ‘league’; nor, in view of the danger presented to 
the people in Germany [by] such a connection, could I have 
anything to do with it, no matter what the circumstances. Levy 
returned to Dusseldorf, and as I was shortly afterwards intormed 
by letter, spoke very highly of you while denouncing my 
‘doctrinaire’ indifference.'" 

Since 1852, then, I have known nothing of ‘party in the sense 
implied in your letter. Whereas you are a poet, | am a critic and 
for me the experiences of 1849-52 were quite enough. The 
‘League’, like the société des saisons in Paris!’ and a hundred other 
societies, was simply an episode in the history of a party that ts 
everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern 
society. 

There are two things I have to prove in Berlin (I mean with 
regard to this hoary and outdated business of the League): 

First, that since 1852 no such society has existed of which I have 
been a member, 

next, that in as much as he slings Telleringian mud, and worse, 
at the communist society that existed up ull November 1852, 
Mr Vogt is a scoundrelly and infamous slanderer. 

As to the latter point, you, of course, are a witness and your letter 
to Ruge (summer of 1851) proves that, during the period with 
which we are solely concerned here, you regarded attacks of this kind 
as being directed against yourself, too. 

You were a co-signatory to the statements in the Morning 
Advertiser, the Spectator, the Examiner, the Leader, and the People’s 
Paper." One copy of these-is on the court files in Cologne. 

Nor did you raise the least objection when I reverted to this 
matter in my Revelations (p. 47) (Boston edition).” 

a4 K. Marx and F. Engels, [Public Statement to the Editors of the English 
Press]. - > See present edition, Vol. 11, p. 433. 

Again, your name appears—as treasurer—in the appeal we 
published requesting contributions for the convicted men." 

But there’s hardly any need to go into all this again. 

What is imperative, however, is that my lawyer in Berlin* should 
be sent the following letter from me to Engels, this being a legal 
document by virtue of the fact that it was sent without an envelope 
and bears both London and Manchester postmarks. 

‘London, 19 November 1852 
28 Dean Street, Soho 

‘Dear Engels, 

‘Last Wednesday,” at my suggestion, the League disbanded; 
similarly the continued existence of the League on the Continent 
was declared to be no longer expedient. In any case, since the arrest 
of Birgers-Réser, it had to all intents and purposes already ceased 
to exist there. Enclosed a statement for the English papers,‘ etc. In 
addition I am writing, for the Lithographierte Korrespondenz, an article’ 
(instead, I wrote the pamphlet published by Schabelitz) ‘on the dirty 
tricks played by the police, etc., and also an appeal to America for money 
for the prisoners and their families. Treasurer Freiligrath. Signed by 
all our people.” (The few remaining lines are irrelevant.) 

*Your K. M.. 

In the case of such a document [ cannot, of course, delete any 
names. This is the only document in which, with a view to 
substantiating a fact, namely the disbandment of the League, I make 
use of your name, in as much as it happens to occur in a letter 
written by me in 1852. I cannot see how that would compromise 
you. 

I should like to use one letter of yours, written in 1851, for the 
pamphlet which is to appear after the hearing.’ Nothing in the 
least compromising about it, legally speaking. But since this will 
take many weeks, I shall arrange matters with you by word of 
mouth. 

4 J.M. Weber - » 17 November 1852 - © K. Marx and F. Engels, [Public Statement to 
the Editors of the English Press}. - Marx's Revelations Concerning the Communist 
Trial in Cologne - © See present edition, Vol. 39. - ! K. Marx, Herr Vogt. 

From the above it follows that: 

The ‘meetings, resolutions and transactions of the party’ since 
1852 belong to the realm of fantasy, as you might have known in 
any case without my telling you and, judging by a great many of 
your letters to me, evidently did know. 

The only activity in which I persisted after 1852, for as long as it 
continued necessary—i.e. until the end of 1853—in company with 
a few kindred spirits on the other side of the Atlantic, was of the 
kind described by Mr Ludwig Simon in 1851 in the Tribune as a 
‘SYSTEM OF MOCKERY AND contemer’, and was directed against the 
emigration’s democratic humbug and _ revolution-mongering. Your anti- 
Kinkel poem," no less than your correspondence with me during 
that time, prove that you and I were entirely d’accord. 

However, this has nothing to do with the lawsuits. 

Tellering, Bangya, Fleury, etc., never belonged to the ‘League. 
That dirt is thrown up by storms, that no revolutionary period 
smells of attar of roses, that even, at times, one becomes a target 
for all manner of garbage, goes without saying. Aut, aut 
However, when one considers the tremendous efforts made to 
combat us by the whole of the official world, who did not so much 
skim as wade through the depths of the Code pénal in order to 
ruin us; when one considers the slanderous attacks of the 
‘democracy of folly) which could never forgive our party for 
having more brains and character than itself; when one knows the 
parallel history of all the other parties; when one finally asks 
oneself what can actually be held (other than, say, the infamies 
refutable in court, of a Vogt or a Tellering) against the party as a 
whole, one can only conclude that what distinguishes it in this, the 
nineteenth century, is its purity. 

Can one escape the filth in bourgeois intercourse or Trane? But 
in the latter, the filth has its natural habitat. Example: Sir 
R. Carden, vide the Parliamentary Blue Book on corrupt election 
practices.” Example: Mr Klapka, concerning whose personal details 
I am now very well informed. KI. is not one whit better, and 
possibly worse, than Bangya whom, by the by, he and Kossuth 
have been sheltering to this day in Constantinople, despite his 
heroic deeds in Circassia and despite my public denunciation," 

a F. Freiligrath, ‘An Josef Weydemeyer’, Zwei poetische Episteln. Epistel 1. - 
b Either, or. - © Report of Committee on the Operation and Effects of the C nies Practices 
Prevention Act 1854. Evidence, Appendix and Index, London, 1860. . Marx, ‘A 
Traitor in Circassia’, ‘A Curious Piece of History’ and ‘Another Suanve Poa of 
Modern History’. 

simply because he knew too much about them. As a person Bangya 
was more decorous than Kl. He kept a mistress; for years Klapka 
allowed a mistress to keep him, etc. The filth of a Tellering may 
well be counterbalanced by the purity of a Beta, and even the 
dissoluteness of a Reiff finds its equivalent in the chastity of a 
Paula* who, at any rate, was not a member of the party, nor made 
any pretence so to be. 

The honourable meanness or mean honourableness of solvent 
(and this subject only to highly ambiguous provisos, as every trade 
crisis goes to show) morality is to my mind not one whit superior 
to disrespectable meanness, from the taint of which neither the 
first Christian communities, nor the Jacobin Club, nor our 
erstwhile ‘League’ could remain entirely free. But bourgeois 
intercourse accustoms one to the loss of one’s sense of respectable 
meanness or mean respectability. 

3. The special matter of Vogt and Blind. 

Following the affidavits made by Végele’* and Wiehe” (as 
everyone knows, a false affidavit entails transportation) and 
following the statements extracted in consequence thereof —from 
Blind in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung’ and from Dr Schaible 
(Daily Telegraph of 15 February)"—the affair has resolved itself to 
the extent that your testimony relating to this point has now been 
rendered quite superfluous. As regards the Blind case, my only 
problem is an embarras de richesses. 

In this matter I] approached Ernest Jones, with whom I had not 
consorted for two years on account of his foolish, but now publicly 
disavowed, attitude to Bright, Gilpin, etc.''’ I approached him 
firstly because he, like many others, some of them quite unknown 
to me, let me know spontaneously, immediately after the Telegraph 
of 6 February had appeared, how profoundly indignant he was at 
the infamous conduct of Vogt, who had had the effrontery to 
assert that the Communist League had been founded and, from 
1849 to 1852, had operated, with one end in view, namely to extort 
money from compromised people in Germany by threatening to denounce 
them, who traced back my ‘connection’ with the Neue Preussische 
Zeitung to my ‘relationship by marriage’ to von Westphalen, etc. 
(For my wife’s sake I was glad of this demonstration, since one can 

* Paula-Krécher - & See this volume, pp. 31-32 and 37. - © K. Blind, ‘Gegen Karl 
Vogt’, Aligemeine Zeitung, No. 44 (supplement), 13 February 1860. - ¢ Ch. Schaible, 
‘The Vogt Pamphlet. To the Editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, 
No. 1447, 15 February 1860. 

hardly expect ladies to grow a political thick skin; moreover, it is 
precisely by catastrophes that they are accustomed to gauge 
whether a friendship is in earnest or in jest); secondly, because I 
was deterred by consideration, not for Blind, but for his wife and 
children, from discussing his case, most invidious from a legal point of 
view, with a true-blue English lawyer. It was this same consideration 
that deterred me from sending the English circular* to the 
Morning Advertiser or to any English daily other than the 
Telegraph. 

What Jones told me was this: 

‘You can go—and I myself will go with you—to the magistrate 
and at once take out a warrant for Blind’s arrest for conspiracy on 
the strength of Wiehe’s affidavit. But bear in mind that this is a 
criminal acvioy and that, once it has been reported, you will have 
no power to withdraw it. 

I then asked Jones (who can tell you this all over again; he lives 
at 5 Cambridge Place, Kensington, W.) whether it wasn’t possible 
for him to warn Blind and thus induce him to make a statement 
that would include, not only everything he knew about Vogt, but 
also an admission of the falsity of the depositions adduced by him 
in the A. A, Z.” 

Jones replied: 

‘In conspiracy, and hence criminal, cases, any attempt by the advocate 
tO COMPOUND OR BRING ABOUT A Compromise Would itself be punishable 
under criminal law.’ 

Jones will act as my councn. in the Telegraph affair. 

After Jones’s pronouncements, I found myself in a most 
awkward and embarrassing situation, for, on the one hand, I owed 
it to my family to compel the Telegraph to recant; on the other, I 
did not wish to take any steps that might be legally injurious to 
Blind’s family. As an expedient I sent to Blind’s friend Louis Blanc 
a copy of both affidavits and a letter, part of which reads (I 
quote): 

‘Nor ror Mr Buinp wuo Has RICHLY DESERVED IT, BU FOR HIS FAMILY, I should 
REGRET BEING FORCED TO LODGE A CRIMINAL ACTION AGAINST HIM.” 

This last move evoked Schaible’s statement (roor pear), just as the 
printed circular,* which I had sent to Blind immediately after it 
came out, had evoked his anti-Vogt statement the self-same day in 

4 K. Marx, ‘Prosecution of the Augsburg Gazette’. - > K. Blind’s statements in the 
Allgemeine Zeitung, Nos. 313 and 345, 9 November and 11 December 1859. 

the A. A. Z.“ Blind may have the hole-and-corner cunning of a 
man from Baden, but he had forgotten that he was confronting 
someone who would be ruthless the moment his own honour, or 
that of his party, was at stake. 

This is how matters stand: The action against The Daily 
Telegraph has been instituted but my souiciror will delay matters 
until after the case against the National-Zeitung has been decided. 
Had Schaible told me frankly what he knew against Vogt (Schaible 
is Blind’s ‘vame erepHant, of course), it would have been wholly 
unnecessary for me, after his statement had appeared in the 
Telegraph of 15 February, to lodge the affidavits in London. In 
Berlin, where it will have no legal repercusions on Blind, this will, 
of course, be unavoidable. Whether Schatble was the real (literary) 
author of the ‘flysheet’ or not does nothing to alter the facts 
established in the affidavits, namely that the depositions adduced 
by Blind in the A. A. Z.° were false, that they were obtained by 
means of a conspiracy, that the flysheet had been printed in 
Hollinger’s printshop, written in Blind’s hand and handed over by 
him to Hollinger to be printed. 

Distasteful though these matters certainly are, they are not 
more distasteful than European history as a whole since 1851], 
with all its achievements in the diplomatic, military and literary 
fields. 

‘For all that and all that’,* the philistine upon me will always be a 
better device for us than I beneath the philistine« 

I have frankly stated my views, with which I trust you are 
largely in agreement. Moreover, I have tried to dispel the 
misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by ‘party’ I 
meant a ‘League’ that expired eight years ago, or an editorial 
board that was disbanded twelve years ago.' By party, I meant the 
party in the broad historical sense. 

With sincere assurances of my friendship, 

Your 
K. Marx 

P. S. I have just had a letter from my wife, and should 
accordingly be much obliged if you would draw £16 on the 

« K. Blind, ‘Gegen Karl Vogt’, Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 44 (supplement, 
13 February 1860. - > Zur Warnung - © See this volume, pp. 60-61. - 4 An allusion to 
Freiligrath’s poem ‘Trotz alledem!’ - ¢ Cf. Judges, 16:9 - £ This refers to the. Neue 
Rheinische Zeitung. 

Tribune on Saturday (the day after tomorrow) (not on Friday as I am 
also including the Tuesday article). As usual, the plenipotentiary- 
general" will pay you a call.