London, 12 November 1866 

My dear Mr Lafargue, 

I hope our friend i! amoroso* has apologised to you on my 
behalf for my inexcusable silence. On the one hand, I have been 
plagued by constantly recurring illness, on the other, I have been 
so taken up by a very lengthy work” that I have neglected my 
correspondence with my closest friends. If I did not count you 
among that category, I should never have dared so to offend 
against propriety. 

My sincere thanks for the wine. Being myself from a wine- 
growing region, and former owner of a vineyard,*” I know a good 
wine when I come across one. I even incline somewhat to old 
Luther’s view that a man who does not love wine will never be 
good for anything. (There are exceptions to every rule.) But one 
cannot, for example, deny that the political movement in England 
has been spurred on by the commercial treaty with France and the 
import of French wines.*”' That is one of the good things that 
Louis Bonaparte was capable of doing, whereas poor Louis 
Philippe was so intimidated by the manufacturers in the North 
that he did not dare enter into commercial treaties with England. 
It is only to be regretted that regimes such as the Napoleonic one, 
which are founded on the weariness and impotence of the two 
antagonistic classes of society, buy some material progress at the 
expense of general demoralisation. Fortunately, the mass of 
working men cannot be demoralised. Manual labour is the great 
antidote for all the ills of society. 

You will have been just as delighted by the defeat of President 
Johnson in the latest elections as I was.*” The workers in the 
North have at last fully understood that white labour will never be 
emancipated so long as black labour is still stigmatised. 

On Saturday evening Citizen Dupont brought me a letter 
addressed to Paul‘ by the secretary of the College of Surgeons. He 
required some papers which were neither in the possession of my 
daughter‘ (except for his baccalauréat diploma) nor of the person 

a the lovelorn gentleman (Paul Lafargue) - > Capital -¢ Paul Lafargue - 4 Laura 
Marx 

who has charge of your son’s effects. You will therefore have to send 
us these documents at once. 

Please be so good as to tell your son that he will greatly oblige 
me by desisting from propaganda in Paris. This is a dangerous 
time. The best thing he can do in Paris is to use his time to profit 
by his association with Dr Moilin. It will do him no harm to spare 
his polemical strength. The more he holds himself in check, the 
better he will be as a fighter when the right moment comes. 

My daughter asks me to request you to be so kind as to send 
with Paul some photograms of Madame Lafargue and of yourself. 

All my family joins me in greetings to the Lafargue family. 

Yours ever 

Kar] Marx