[Draft]
London, 26 June 1879
122 Regent’s Park Road, N. W.

Dear Comrade,

I am sorry you didn’t tell me from the start that in making your
inquiry you had my reporting in mind*; had you done so, you
would have received a definite answer straight away.

When, after being much pressed to do so, I decided to tackle
the tedious Mr Dühring, I told Liebknecht that this was positively
the last time I would allow journalistic activities to interfere with
my more substantial work ** unless political events made this
absolutely imperative—something I alone must decide.” During
the nine years I have spent here in London, I have learnt that it’s

@ See previous letter. - > Cf. this volume, pp. 257-58.

no good trying to complete more substantial works while
simultaneously engaging in practical agitation. I grow no younger
with the passage of time and must at long last restrict myself
to definite tasks if I am to get anything done at all. I wrote
and told Mr Wiede as much when he founded the Neue Gesellschaft.*

As for Mr Héchberg, you are mistaken if you think that I feel
any ‘antipathy’ towards him. When Mr Héchberg founded the
Zukunft, we got invitations to contribute signed ‘the Editorial
Board’.*"* Unless 1 am much mistaken, Mr Hochberg was not even
known to us by name at that time, and it goes without saying that
we paid no attention to anonymous communications of this kind.
Soon after, Mr Héchberg made known his programme of the
Zukunft, according to which socialism was to arise out of the
concept of ‘justice’. Such a programme directly excluded from the
outset all those who ultimately regarded socialism, not as the
logical outcome of any idea or principle such as justice, etc., but as
the ideal product of a material-economic process, of the social
process of production at a given stage. Thus Mr Hochberg had
himself precluded all possibility of our collaborating with him. But
aside from the above programme, nothing has come to my notice
on the strength of which I could form any authentic idea of Mr
Hochberg’s philosophical views. Not that all this is in any way a
reason for feeling any ‘antipathy’ towards him, or prejudice
against a literary venture for which he is responsible. On the
contrary, I adopt the same attitude towards it as I do towards any
other prospective socialist publication until I know what’s going to
be in it—one of sympathy and expectation.

But that is all by the way—the fact of the matter is that I must
restrain myself from contributing to journals if I mean to finish
work that really ought to be of greater importance to the
movement as a whole than an article or two in periodicals. And, as
you can see, I have for several years observed this rule impartially
vis-a-vis all-comers.

I am also interested to see from your letter that people over
here have led you to believe that I, and presumably Marx as well,
am ‘in complete agreement’ with the policy of the Freiheit.
Precisely the reverse is true. We have not seen Mr Most since he
began his attacks on the Social-Democratic deputies.*° Nor was he
able to learn what we thought of this until the middle of the

@ See this volume, pp. 253-54. - > Die Zukunft. Socialistische Revue. Prospect. See also
Héchberg’s leading article, ‘Der Socialismus und die Wissenschaft’, published in 1877
in the first issue of the Zukunft.

month when I replied to an invitation from the secretary“ of the
Workers’ Society” to go and lecture there.” I refused outright
because it could only lead people in Germany, etc., to conclude
that I agreed with the kind of polemic the Freiheit is conducting,
and publicly at that, against the Social-Democratic deputies; little
though I may approve of certain statements in the Reichstag, this
is by no means the case.

As we have heard much the same thing from another quarter,
we would be glad to be in a position that would enable us to scotch
these misrepresentations once and for all. The simplest way of
doing this would be for you, if you would be so kind, to let us
have a copy of the relevant passages from letters so that we may
know precisely what has been said about us and conduct ourselves
accordingly. Your allusions could, of course, be only of a general
nature, but for that very reason it is all the more desirable that we
should have some definite information so that we can act upon it
direct. After almost forty years, revolutionary tittle-tattle is
something that has ceased to surprise us.

Should Mr Most fall into the hands of the anarchists, or even of
Russians of Tkachov’s stamp, it would at most spell his own
undoing. These chaps will fall victim to the anarchy they have
themselves created. Which is not to say that it mightn’t be quite a
good thing to knock them on the head every now and again.

Unless one or two of the works you mention are still to be had
at the booksellers, I would not be able to get hold of copies for
you; I myself no longer possess a copy of some of them and have
tried in vain to get them second-hand.

As regards the French movement, besides our .contacts with
party members over here, we also maintain direct relations with
Paris nor, for that matter, were the links we established at the time
of the International ever broken at all. Thus, for instance, only
quite recently we received a new socialist paper appearing in
Oporto, O operario.