Manchester, 3 March 1860 
6 Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road 

Dear Lassalle, 

I am replying by return, albeit briefly (though, I hope, 
intelligibly), for I am up to my eyes in work connected with the 
two lawsuits. 

1. Ad vocem’: My action against the ‘National-Zeitung”. 

You cannot give an opinion on the possible outcome of this 
action since you don’t know, on the one hand, what papers I have 
in my possession, or, on the other, how totally unfounded Vogt’s 
lies are. But you ought to have favoured the attack from the very 
outset. The second action is against the Daily Telegraph in London, 
for having enlarged on and reproduced the articles in the N.-Z° 
The Telegraph is the vilest daily paper in London, which is saying 
a great deal, but it is assuredly not small. It has the largest 
circulation of all the London daily papers. Is specially subsidised 
by Palmerston. This is the reason why it devotes so much space to 
the mud slung at me. 

I am enclosing my Knight of the Noble Consciousness herewith. 

2. The ‘superbe gestus’’ exists only in your imagination.''* On the 
other hand, Engels, Wolff and my wife, to whom I showed both 

4 Presumably Helene Demuth. - > Re - © ‘Karl Vogt und die Allgemeine Zeitung’ 
and ‘Wie man radikale Flugblatter macht’, National-Zeitung, Nos. 37 and 41, 22 and 25 
January 1860. - 4 ‘haughty gesture’ 

your letters, are unanimously agreed that they betray what looks 
uncommonly like disconcertedness at Vogt’s libellous piece*— 
always assuming that tres faciunt collegium.” 

I sent you the note,° etc., in order to demonstrate to you ad 
oculos’ how you would flare up when confronted with a piece of 
infernal rubbish which has neither appeared in print nor ap- 
proaches the level of Vogt’s infamies. 

Vogt has charged me with punishable vacrs. In your letters I 
could find no trace of indignation at this worthy citizen to whom, 
for good measure, I am expected to make a public amende 
honorable. Had Vogt known of your relations with me and been in 
possession of Wiss’s note, he would have published it .as an 
authentic document relating to the history of the ‘Brimstone 
Gang’.” To suggest that (other than in a letter to you‘) I had 
alluded anywhere—and in public—to Blind’s anti-Vogt stuff, is a 
flippant allegation on your part. That V. is a Bonapartist agent has 
become perfectly clear to me from his book.! When Willich 
(Techow merely wrote” what Willich had prompted him to in 
1850) slung mud of a similar kind at me in the United States in 
1853,8 Weydemeyer, Dr Jacobi and Cluss came out spontaneously, 
even before I myself could have been notified of it, with a public 
statement to the effect that the whole thing was an infamous piece 
of slander." None of my friends in Germany had uttered a word 
of protest against this extravagant attack; instead they wrote 
admonishing me in patriarchal tones. 

Hence it was wholly pertinent to use the note, etc., for the 
purpose of putting you in my position, or rather of instilling in 
you a correct, if somewhat less dispassionate and doctrinaire, view 
of the same. 

What I sent you was not a copy of Dr Wiss’s letter but the 
original (i.e. the copy sent me from America). Dronke knows 
nothing about the note. 

9 

There’s no question of a dossier.''? In a private letter to the 

aC. Vogt, Mein Prozess gegen die Allgemeine Zeitung, Geneva, 1859. - > three 
constitute a panel - © See this volume, p. 58. - ¢ right before your very eyes - ¢ See 
Marx’s letters to Lassalle, one written not before 2 October and the other on 
6 November 1859, present edition, Vol. 40, pp. 497-98, 518-22. -  C. Vogt, Studien 
zur gegenwirtigen Lage Europas, Geneva and Berne, 1859. - § A. Willich, ‘Doctor Karl 
Marx und seine “Enthillungen”’. In: Belletristisches Journal und New-Yorker 
Criminal-Zeitung, Nos. 33 and 34, 28 October and 4 November 1853. - 
h J. Weydemeyer, A. Cluss, A. Jacoby, ‘An die Redaction der New-Yorker Criminal- 
Zeitung’. In: Belletristisches Journal und New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung, No. 37, 25 
November 1853. 

recipient of Wiss’s letter,* I referred to you as one of the most 
competent people in our party and an intimate friend of myself 
and Engels.'*? Evidently the recipient, whom I may not name 
without asking him first, showed Wiss the letter, or at any rate told 
him what was in it. Hine Wiss’s lacrimae.” I have no connection 
with Wiss and never have had. Earlier on, he had offered his 
services to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and submitted an article 
which I threw into the waste paper basket unacknowledged. He has 
published half a dozen idiotic articles against me‘ in New York (in 
Weitling’s Republik der Arbeiter). 

I used the word ‘official’ allegations’ simply by way of contrast 
to Wiss’s ‘confidential’ letter. I can see now—I was writing in 
haste—how very comical it was. 

Who the Düsseldorf people‘ were I cannot say without 
committing a breach of confidence. Suffice it to observe, however, 
that I did not get in contact with them. As for the ingratitude of 
the workers towards you, that’s a mere bagatelle compared with 
what I have had to put up with. However it isn’t Levy, either as a 
person or collectively. Becker,; Bermbach, Erhard, Uhlendorff (the 
last name unknown to me) have never written me a single line 
either against you or about you.'*’ 

I did not ‘ally myself’? with Becker. The League’s Central 
Authority had been transferred to Cologne.'” It was there that the 
final decisions had to be taken. (This ‘League’, like everything 
connected with it, has long been a thing of the past. With two or 
three exceptions, its documents are in America.) Becker was 
enrolled there. Thus, he established liaison with me. 

If you will now compare the aforementioned racrs with your 
interpretation of the same, your particular aptitude for ‘mistrust’ 
will become plain to you. 

As to my mistrust, I know (and you would oblige me by quoting 
other instances) that, during my eighteen years of public activities, 
there have been only two instances when this mental disorder 
might, with some plausibility, have been imputed to me. 

a. In the N. Rh. Zeit. I accepted a denunciation of Bakunin 
which had originated in Paris from two wholly unrelated sources. 

a Adolf Cluss - » Hence Wiss’s tears (an allusion to a phrase in Terence’s Andria, I, 1, 
99). -° G. Wiss, Die elementaren Richtungen der Zeit. In: Republik der Arbeiter, Nos. 
12-22 and 24, 18 and 25 March; 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29 April; 6, 13, 20 and 27 May; 
10 June 1854.-4¢ See this volume, p. 58. - © ibid. -f Hermann Becker - 
8 [A. H. Ewerbeck,] ‘Bakunin’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 36, 6 July 1848. 

One of these sources was a Polish acquaintance of mine. The other 
was the Paris Lithographierte Korrespondenz, which meant that, even 
were I not to print the denunciation, every newspaper editor 
would have had it. A public accusation was in the interests of the 
cause and in the interests of Bakunin. I had Bakunin’s counter- 
statement in the Neue Oder-Zeitung reprinted without delay.* 
Koscielski, whom he had sent to Cologne as his second to call me 
out, examined the letters from Parts, whereupon he was so 
convinced that it had been my dufy as an editor to publish the 
denunciation (I printed it without comment, as though it were an 
article) that he wrote by return of post and told Bakunin he could 
no longer act as his second. K. came to be one of the N. Rh. Z's 
best and most useful friends. I printed a public apology to 
Bakunin in the N. Rh. Z.,? made it up with him personally in Berlin 
(August 1848) and, later, broke a lance for him in the Tribune 
(1851).'°8 

b. In the Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial several 
people, particularly Schapper, O. Dietz and, to a lesser extent, 
Willich, are treated unjustly; however, 

Schapper himself (and Dietz in a letter to Schapper) has admitted 
that in principle I was in the right so far as they were concerned; 

that they got mixed up in acts of such folly that’only by a 
miracle could they have expected to elude suspicion; 

that Willich was out of his mind at the time and capable of any 
move against me, indeed was guilty of infamous moves against me 
and my friends. 

Finally: 

The remark: ‘As to my mistrust, at least you can’t complain about 
that” 

was a legitimate reply to your remark: (I quote from memory) 
‘As regards those who know you, no harm will be done to you by 
Vogt’s pamphlet, etc.’ It was to this anodyne assurance I was 
retorting. 

As to the ‘great deal of truth’,* I must take another look at your 
letter in London. 

I trust that all points have now been settled. 

Your 
K. M. 

aM. Bakunin, ‘Erklarung’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 47 (supplement), 16 July 
1848. - © Editorial statement in the column ‘Franzésische Republik’, Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung, No. 64, 3 August 1848. - © See this volume, p. 58. - d ibid. 

5— 558 

Just one thing more. You advised me to postpone the ‘action’ until 
I had actually read Vogt’s book.* Were the excerpts in the N.-Z. 
not enough? Could anyone who was ‘integer vitae scelerisque purus” 
wait any longer? 

Adolf Stahr—mightn’t he know the Telegraph's‘ correspondent? 
At all events, the latter came out with some stuff after Mrs 
Kinkel’s death that smacked of Fanny Lewald.'**