MARX TO ENGELS‘ 

[London,] 30 January 1865 
Dear Engels, 

Tout d’accord? As far as your anxiety about confiscation is 
concerned, what you must do is to announce quite briefly, as a 
foreword to the first article,? that you are firstly going to throw 
light on the subject from the military point of view, secondly you 
are going to criticise the bourgeoisie and, thirdly, the reaction, 
etc., and the attitude of the workers’ party to the question, etc., 
whereby the drift can already be narrowly outlined or hinted at. 
This will, de prime abord’ make it more difficult for the 
government to confiscate. If it does so in spite of that, the 
Social-Demokrat will thereby be hurled into a new phase (for the 
fellows cannot at present confiscate without releasing the confis- 
cated material, or taking it to court), and, at the same time, you 
must keep a copy of the manuscript of No. III. It is then the 
easiest thing in the world to publish it in the one of the 2 German 
papers here’ and then send cops of it to Hamburg, etc., where 
one or other of the bourgeois papers is sure to print it. 

It seems to me that Schily has allowed himself to be duped by 
M. Hess. This is quite evident from all Moses’ epistles to the 
Social-Demokrat. (Cr. v1. No. 15 of the Soctal-Demokrat which has 
just arrived and is, on the whole, full of the most revolting 
‘Lassalleanism’. The gentlemen from Iserlohn speak of ‘Lassalle- 
Lincoln’.') Moses is our adversary, has forgotten neither our 
‘expulsion from Brussels’ nor our ‘ejection from Cologne’ '™ and 
always counts it to Lassalle’s credit that he had the ‘tact’ so 
necessary for a ‘leader of the people’ to take M. Hess seriously. 

By the way, being the ‘organ of the General Association of 
German Workers’, the Secial-Demokrat finds it extremely difficult 
to extricate itself from the apotheosis-soup. 

* In complete agreement (see previous letter) - > F. Engels, The Prussian Military 
Question and the German Workers’ Party, Chapter 1.-‘° from the outset - 4 The 
reference is presumably to the Hermann and the Londoner Anzeiger.- © A reference to 
Hess’ report ‘Paris, 25. Jan. [Associationswesen. Clerus. Der oppositionelle Wahlsieg]’, 
Der Social-Demokrat, No. 15, 29 January 1865. - £ Quoted from the report ‘Iserlohn, 
25. Januar’, Der Social-Demokrat, No. 15, 29 January 1865. 

Incidentally, since we now know that Izzy planned to trade off 
the workers’ party to Bismarck (we were previously quite 
unaware of how) so that he might become known as the ‘Richelieu 
of the Proletariat’, I shall not now have any scruples about making 
it sufficiently plain in the preface to my book that he is a parrot 
and plagiarist.'° 

I wonder whether the ‘poems’: “To follow Lassalle is our every 
wish’* and other nonsense which the workers are sending to the 
Soctal-Demokrat, do not emanate directly or indirectly from the old 
lady.” At all events, I have already told the editors several times in 
writing that this nonsense has got to stop sy and sy. 

What sort of fellows the men of Progress are is evident yet 
again from their conduct regarding the combination question.‘ 
(En passant, the Prussian Anti-Combination Law, like all continen- 
tal laws of this kind, has its origin in the decree of the Assemblée 
Constituante of 14 June 1791, by which the French bourgeois 
imposed the most severe penalties on anything or THE sort, in fact 
workers’ associations of any kind,—e.g. loss of civil rights for a 
year—on the pretext that this constituted restoration of the guilds 
and 1s in contravention of liberté constitutionelle’ and the ‘droits de 
lV’homme’.* It is so characteristic of Robespierre that, at a time when 
it was a crime punishable by the guillotine to be ‘constitutional’, as 
defined by the Assemblée of 1789, all of its laws directed against 
the workers remained in force.) 

Here in London Mr Bright has again spoiled his whole rapport 
with the workers by his speech opposing the application of the 
Ten Hours’ Bill’ to the Birmincnam rrapes.© A bourgeois of that 
kind really is incorricisie. And the fellow does that at a mo- 
ment when he wants to make use of the workers to beat the 
oligarchs! 

Apropos. As I have now told the Social-Demokrat twice that they 
must purge their paper of this infantile ‘apotheosis’ as far and as 
quickly as possible, it will doubtless do no harm if you make 
similar remarks to the editors when you send your article.‘ If we 
allow them to use our names, then we can, at the same time, 
demand that now, when people are aware of Lassalle’s intended 
treachery, they should not help to throw dust in the eyes of the 

4 Quoted from an anonymous poem published in the section ‘Einsendungen von 
Arbeitern’ in Der Social-Demokrat, No. 15, 29 January 1865. -> Sophie von 
Hatzfeldt - © constitutional liberty - 4 ‘rights of man’ - © J. Bright’s speech in the 
Birmingham Chamber of Commerce on 19 January 1865. In: The Times, No. 25087, 
20 January 1865.- The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party