[London,] 21 January 1877 

Dear Friend, 

To begin with, my best thanks for the medicinal salts and my 
regret that your first, long letter went astray. 

Tomorrow a small parcel of books goes off from here to 
Madame Wollmann, containing the French edition of Capital for 
your cousin and, for yourself (from the ‘child’*), Lissagaray’s 
Histoire de la Commune. 

The muster-roll of the Social-Democratic party in Germany on 
the occasion of the general elections”’’ has rudely alarmed, not 
only our amiable German philistine, but also les classes dominantes 
in England and France. An English paper comments sourly upon, 
inter alia, the contrast between ‘THE MELODRAMATIC FITS AND STARTS OF THE 
FRENCH AND THE BUSINESSLIKE WAY OF PROCEEDING OF THE GERMAN SOCIALISTS’. 

The increasing extent to which even the ideologists of the 
German middle classes are being affected by the insidious poison 
is evident from, amongst other things, a short pamphlet recently 
published by an old acquaintance of yours, Schaffle, entitled Die 
Quintessenz des Socialismus. You ought to order the thing, if only 
for amusement’s sake. It is full of unintentional comedy. For, on 
the one hand, the little book, as the author himself indicates, is 
aimed especially at Protestant clergymen who, after all, cannot 
leave flirtation with socialism entirely to their Catholic rivals. On 
the other, Mr Schaffle, with a fantasy truly Swabian, paints so 
pretty a picture of the future socialist millennium as to make it 
seem the kingdom come of your cosy petty bourgeois, a paradise 
fit only for the Karl Mayers of this world. 

Not only is the weather here unspeakable—close, damp, with a 
fog in so deep a tinge of yellow that one has, as I do, to keep the 
gaslight on throughout the morning, but the ‘Orientat Question’ is 
rampant. Wherever you go, you're buttonholed by un John Bull 
quelconque”: ‘Now, SiR, WHAT po you THINK OF THE ORIENTAL Question?’ 
Politeness precludes one from giving the only appropriate answer: 
‘T ruink, Sir, THAT YOU ARE A DAMNED ASS.’ 

4 Eleanor Marx - > some John Bull or other 

7 whether favourable or 

Whatever the outcome of the war,” 
unfavourable to the Little Father in Petersburg,’ that ‘sick man’,” 
deafened and confused by the hysterical philanthropic bellowing 
of the English liberal ‘party or prorir at any price’, has given the signal 
for a convulsion which has long been in the making within his own 
Empire, the ultimate result of which will be to put paid to the 
whole of old Europe’s present status quo. 

Please give your dear cousin my warmest regards and apply 
yourself seriously to the study of the English language, for if the 
worst comes to the worst, England is still the best place in which to 
set up medical quarters. 

Yours very sincerely, 

Karl Marx