[Draft] 

London, 10 October 1878 
41 Maitland Park Road, N. W. 

Dear Sir, 

I have confined myself to point out in the proof-sheets one or 
two mistakes. To enter on the more important mis-statements, I 
had neither the leisure, nor would it have suited your purpose. 

Proof-sheet b. 

I have struck out: ‘one of whom was the youthful Lassalle’. He 
was never a collaborator of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, though he 
first entered at that time into personal relations with me. 

I have added ‘the Russian’ translation of the Capital, because it 
is exactly in Russia that the younger University Professors have 
openly adopted and defended my theory.*”° 

Proof-sheet d. 

I have struck out ‘and formerly one of its members’. Mehring was 
never a member of the German Social-Democratic Party; the fact 
is that, by denouncing to Liebknecht some operations of the 
manager of the reptile funds,*” he tried to become a member. 
Soon after, having been publicly branded with infamy by a 
judgment of the Frankfurt tribunal, on the occasion of his action 
for defamation against Herr Sonnemann (the proprietor of the 
Frankfurter Zeitung),**’ he boldly accepted his position as a literary 

scamp. Even the most conservative amongst the honest adversaries 
of German Social Democracy would be rather startled to find such 
a man styled: ‘the historian of Social Democracy’. Of course, he 
enjoys the esteem of Mr Bamberger who, as a refugee in Paris, 
after the downfall of the Revolution of 1848 in Germany (he had 
acted during that revolution the part of a spouting demagogue), 
got his practical training at the hands of the Second Empire 
financiers, enriched himself by his participation in the Mexico 
loan swindle,** etc., returned to Germany after the Prussian 
victory and became one of the leading spirits of the German 
‘Bérsen- und Griindungsschwindelperiode’.* It is not exactly Mr Albert 
Grant at London (and he is of the Bamberger stamp, and, 
curiously to say, native of the same town—Mayence) one would 
address himself to for information and criticism of the Owenite 
movement f.1. 

How far you were happy in considering Mr Howell’s article (in 
The Nineteenth Century) as a ‘historical source’, you may see from 
the sheet I forward with these lines.*” 

I shall forward you to-morrow Mr Engels’ book.°