It would certainly be very nice if a really scientific socialist 
periodical were to appear. This would provide an opportunity for 
criticism and counter-criticism in which theoretical points could be 
discussed by us and the total ignorance of professors and 
university lecturers exposed, thereby simultaneously disabusing the 
minds of the general rustic—workers and bourgeois alike. But 
Wiede’s periodical* cannot be other than sham-scientific; those same 
semi-educated louts and semi-informed literati, who infest the 
Neue Welt, Vorwarts, etc., will perforce constitute the bulk of its 
contributors. In such company ruthlessness—the prime require- 
ment in all criticism—becomes impossible; moreover, constant 
heed must be paid to comprehensibility, i.e. to presentation for the 
ignorant. Imagine a chemical periodical in which the reader’s 
ignorance of chemistry is invariably taken for granted. And apart 
from all that, the way in which those who would perforce be 
Wiede’s contributors have conducted themselves in the Dühring 
affair calls for the précaution of maintaining as much distance 
from these gentlemen as political party relations permit.*” Their 
motto seems to be: Anyone who criticises his adversary by abusing 
him is a man of sensibility; but he who abuses an adversary by 
genuinely criticising him is an unworthy individual. 

I trust that the Russians’ impudent goings-on beyond the 
Balkans will stir up the Turks against their old regime. The fact 
that the Russian defeats in European Turkey are leading straight 
to revolution in Russia has now been made plain even to Lavrov 
and Lopatin by the outbursts in the Russian press following the 
FAILURES in Armenia, outbursts which no censorship could have 
suppressed. The tone of the Petersburg newspapers is more 
menacing than that of the German press at the time when the 
siege of Paris was not proceeding as expected.” 

For a few days during the past week and the early part of this 
one, my insomnia and a correspondingly chaotic condition of the 
cranial nerves assumed serious dimensions. Yesterday it started to 
get better again. 

With kindest regards from family to family 

Your 
Moor