London, 28 April 1881 
Dear Bebel, 

In response to your inquiry I asked my source (a stockbroker) 
whether the person concerned would do better to continue paying the 
Great Britain Mutuat & Co. (Office 101, Cheapside, it’s the same surely? 
Great Britain Mutuat Insurance?) or to stop payment of the calls, and 
received the reply: 

* ‘We fear there is no alternative but to keep on paying the calls as they are 
made.’ ** 

Ede? has sent us the stenographic reports of the Reichstag debates 
on the state of siege and the Accident Insurance Bill. '** We congra- 

* Engels supplies this English text in parentheses after the German translation of this 
sentence.-” Eduard Bernstein 

tulate you on both your speeches. The one on the Accident Bill 
pleased us particularly. It strikes the right note— high-minded, yet 
based on a real knowledge of the facts, and ironically superior. Your 
criticism of the Bill was all that could have been said or desired. I have 
been expressly asked to tell you all this on Marx’s behalf as well as my 
own. It was the best speech of yours we have ever read, and the de- 
bate gave one the impression that the turner, Bebel, was the only 
educated man in the whole of the Reichstag. 

At the 2nd reading you might possibly include the following: You 
might perhaps ask us, gentlemen, how we can prevail upon our con- 
sciences to grant money to this government, even though it be for the 
relief of workers who have met with an accident? Gentlemen, after 
what the Prussian Landtag and you yourselves have done in the mat- 
ter of subventions, the power of the Reichstag in financial affairs, its 
ability to wring concessions from the government by virtue of the fact 
that it holds the purse-strings, has gone by the board. The Reichstag 
and Landtag have thrown away their entire budgetary authority 
with nothing to show for it in return, and here it is certainly no longer 
a case of a paltry million or two.— All those subventions, moreover, 
were for purposes of exploitation (protective tariffs, purchase of the 
railways at 30% above their value— Rhenish Rail were standing at 
less than 120, rose to 150 as a result of the government’s offer to pur- 
chase, now 160!), and this time it is, after all, at least supposed to be for 
the workers. 

For the rest, the terms of acceptance you proposed fully protect you 
to your rear. 

But what a typically inflated, maliciously stupid, Prussian Junker- 
cum-bureaucrat Brother von Puttkamer is! '*5 

Your 

FOE, 

Marx sends kindest regards. 
Ede writes to say that he is staying on for the time being.: