Engels to August Bebel
in Leipzig

London, 30 March 1881

Dear Bebel,

Viereck (a postcard from him is enclosed) wants me to give you a report on the Boston meeting; but, as usual with combined operations, one hitch came after another; first, Harney wrote a week later, second, he forgot to enclose the newspaper report, which I received only yesterday. I gave this to Kautsky today, who is here, to work it up for the “Sozialdemokrat”.

The meeting in Boston was brilliant – 1,500 people despite poor advertising, one third Germans. First spoke Swinton, an American communist, who visited us here last summer and is the owner of a big New York newspaper. Then Fritzsche. Finally Wendell Phillips, the great anti-slavery man, who did more than anyone, John Brown excepted, for the abolition of slavery and the prosecution of the war, and who is the first orator of America, perhaps of the world. He paid the Germans the debt of thanks he owed them, for in 1861 in all the large cities the German gymnasts had covered him with their bodies against the American mob and had preserved St. Louis for the Union. 2! How he spoke, here is just a sample: “As far as I am from the field of battle, I do not permit myself to criticise the method of battle. I look at Russia, 4,000 miles away, and see what a nightmare weighs upon the people there. I only hope that someone will be found to lift it from the people’s shoulders. And if only the dagger can do that, then I say: Welcome, dagger! Is there an American here who disapproves of that? If so, let him look (pointing to a wall painting) at Joe Warren, who died at Bunker Hill.” That was on 7 March; on the 13th the bomb did what the dagger could not.

According to today’s “Standard”, Most is to be prosecuted by the English government for the article on the assassination! If the Russian legation and Gladstone are absolutely bent on making the silly Hans into a great man, then they cannot be helped. It is by no means certain as yet that Most will be convicted. The moral indignation of the big papers over the bomb was largely a matter of propriety, which the bourgeois here never shirks out of sheer hypocrisy. The comic papers, which reflect public feeling far more faithfully, have taken the case quite differently, and by the time the final hearing comes, many things may still change, so that the required unanimous verdict of 12 jurymen is by no means yet certain. [229]

To return to our American friends, the intervention of Wendell Phillips (brought about by a young American journalist, Willard Brown, who was often at Marx’s here last year and who in general did everything for them with the American press and provided the necessary publicity for them) is of the highest importance. The success altogether exceeds my expectations and shows that, even among the Germans, even citizens, in America, Bismarckery has fallen into great decay. Bebel’s hopes of a second journey with Liebknecht will hardly be realised – one must not come twice so quickly. Moreover, the great Petersburg event and its inevitable consequences may render such a journey – which would in any case only be permissible next year – superfluous. Alexander III must, whether he likes it or not, set the stone rolling by some decisive step; until then, however, there may still be a short period of severe persecution, and Switzerland will probably soon proceed to mass expulsions. Meanwhile old Wilhelm? is getting more and more soft in the head, unless he croaks; Bismarck is getting madder by the day and seems forcibly bent on playing the Prussian raging Roland; the bourgeois parties are falling apart more and more each day; the government’s tax mania does the rest. Even if we all folded our hands in our laps, events would forcibly push us into the foreground and prepare victory. It is a real pleasure to see such a long-foreseen revolutionary world situation ripening towards the general crisis, to see the blind opponents doing our work for us, to see the law-like character of the development driving towards the world crash asserting itself in and through the general confusion.

Greetings from Marx and Your
F.E.