London, 25 June 1877 

Dear Bracke, 

Many thanks for your remittance of £15.1.2. in payment of 
interest which has been credited to you with thanks. 

You should simply transfer the fee of 30 marks” to your 
election fund, if only by way of a sop to the man’s conscience. 

As for the next Kalender,* let us wait a bit before deciding what 
to do. After all, there’s almost a year to go. 

The beginning of Ditihring, ‘Political Economy’, goes off to 
Leipzig today. Liebknecht maintains that the congress resolution in 
no way affects my articles. I can only assume the same since the 
congress is not, after all, empowered to make arbitrary use of my 
articles or, without my consent, to relieve Liebknecht of the 
commitment he entered into vis-a-vis myself on the strength of a 
resolution adopted by last year’s congress.” 

You really are a martyr to ill-health. One might almost think 
that Brunswick had a dreadfully unwholesome climate. Gout, 
rheumatism, measles and an unknown complaint into the bar- 
gain—it’s truly horrifying! I hope that all will end well. 

What a wretched, petty-minded creature that Helmholtz must be 
so much as to let himself be irritated by the remarks of a Dihring, 
let alone be irritated to the extent of confronting the Berlin 
faculty with the alternative: either Dühring goes or I go!**” As 
though all that Dithring has written, rabidly envious as it is, was of 
any more consequence to science than a fart! But admittedly 
Helmholtz, though a quite outstanding experimentalist, is no whit 
superior to Diithring as a thinker. And then again, a German 
professorship— particularly in Berlin—is the top of German 
petty-bourgeois philistinism and provincialism. Where else could a 
man of, for example, Virchow’s scientific repute set his highest sights 
on— becoming a town councillor! 

You will yet be surprised at the kind of stuff the Turks are 
made of. If only we had in Germany a parliament such as that in 

285 

a Volks-Kalender 

Constantinople! So long as the mass of the people—in this case 
the Turkish peasant and even the Turkish middle landowner— 
remains sound, and sound he is, an oriental polity such as this is 
capable of withstanding a quite incredible amount of buffeting. 
Any other nation would have been destroyed by four hundred 
years of metropolitan corruption, a legacy from the Byzantines; all 
the Turks need do to be a complete match for Russia is slough off 
the topmost layer. Treachery, venality on the part of army leaders 
and commandants of fortresses, the squandering of money 
destined for the army, defalcation of all kinds, everything that 
would ruin any other state, is to be found in abundance in 
Turkey, but not in such abundance as to effect its ruin. The only 
danger for the Turks lies in the meddling of European diplomats, 
notably the English who are restraining the Turks from making 
uninhibited use of their military resources and expect them to put 
up with the most unheard-of provocation. Thus when, for 
instance, the Romanians let the Russians into their country,?” the 
Turks were supposed to regard this as an act of neutrality and 
neither to occupy nor to consolidate the bridgeheads of their 
fortresses on Wallachian territory*—not on your life! That would 
infringe Romania’s neutrality! And the Turks were good-natured 
enough to comply with this English and Austrian claptrap and 
thus reduce the defensive qualities of their Danubian fortifications 
by more than half! 

The crossing of the Danube by the Russians at Matshin, which I 
foretold in conversation with Marx as much as three weeks ago, is 
an admission of their inability to force a crossing where it would 
have been of some use, namely above the Dobrudja.*** The 
Russians will have to send at least two or three army corps 
through the Dobrudja if they want to carry the Chernavoda- 
Kiistend” positions—how they propose to supply them and how 
many will reach their destination, I should dearly like to know. 
This action has been forced upon the Russians by the defeat of 
the Montenegrins ' which they could not allow to happen without 
doing something about it. No doubt the campaign will now get 
under way, and the Russians are faced with the choice of sending 
as many troops across the Danube as military necessity demands 
but they will be unable to feed them, or of sending fewer—no 
more than they can feed,—whereupon the campaign will soon 
come to a halt. Nevertheless, the immediate future will probably 

a See this volume, p. 228. - > Romanian name: Constanta. 

see a rash of Russian victories on the Danube—none of which will 
be of the least significance. 

Kindest regards from your 
F. E.