London, 16 May 1882 

Dear Bebel, 

I have been long meaning to write to you. Particularly since 
I don’t know whether Marx has answered your last letter.2!7 He 
several times promised me that he would, but you know how it is 
when one is ill. So today I have at last got round to it. 

Marx first went to the Isle of Wight,?°* but the weather there was 
cold and wet. Then to Algiers via Paris. Caught cold again during the 
journey, encountering more wet, chilly weather in Algiers, later suc- 
ceeded by rapid variations in temperature. Once again his cold as- 
sumed the form of pleurisy, less severe than his first attack here, but 
long drawn-out. Now he is thoroughly recovered and, since it has at 
last got really hot in Africa, has fled to Monte Carlo, the gaming 
establishment of the Prince of Monaco.’ As soon as the summer has 
really begun, he will leave and join Madame Longuet and her child- 
ren on the Normandy coast; is unlikely to be back before the begin- 
ning of July. All he has got to do now is shake off once and for all 
his obstinate cough, and in this he will probably succeed. He had 
his photograph taken in Algiers and is looking quite his old self 
again. 

It is a great misfortune that you, of all people, should have suffered 
defeat in elections which otherwise went off so splendidly.??? Your 
presence was doubly necessary in view of the many new, and in some 
cases unreliable, elements that have got in. Indeed it would seem 
that, at the start, a number of not very edifying blunders were perpet- 
rated. Now things seem to be going rather better. I was therefore 
doubly delighted (and Marx no less so) by the courageous attitude of 
the Sozaldemokrat, which did not hesitate to come out unequivocally 
against the whining and pusillanimity of Breuel & Co., even when 
deputies such as Blos and Geiser came out in favour of it.2! We, too, 
were appealed to, and Viereck wrote me a very pathetic letter about 
the paper whereat I informed him of my view in altogether amiable if 
no uncertain terms ?°* and, since that time, have heard nothing more 

* Charles IIT 

of him. Hepner, too, has passed this way, ‘sick at heart and poor of 
purse” and terribly sorry for himself; he had written a very indiffer- 
ent little pamphlet 2°? from which I could see how greatly he had de- 
teriorated morally. The chief plaint in both cases was that the So- 
ztaldemokrat failed to take account of the laws presently in force in 
Germany, the contents of the paper being such that its distributors 
were had up by the German courts for lése majesté, high treason, etc. 
Yet it is perfectly evident from the paper itself and the reports of the 
proceedings against our people that, whatever the circumstances, and 
no matter how the paper was written, those swine on the bench 
would find some pretext for committing them. To write a paper in 
such a way as to afford no handle to the said judges is an art that has 
yet to be discovered. And, what is more, these gentlemen forget that 
an organ as weak-kneed as they desire would drive our people pretty 
well en masse into Most’s camp. However, I shall none the less advise 
Bernstein,” to whom we have otherwise lent our moral support when- 
ever possible, to modulate the tone of moral indignation a bit by the 
use of irony and derision, for such a tone, if it is not to become boring, 
has to be so stepped up as ultimately to become ridiculous. 
Singer came to see me the day before yesterday and from him 
I learned that the forwarding address is still all right, something I was 
not quite sure about since we haven’t used it for so long. He has 
another drawback. He belongs to those who regard the nationalisa- 
tion of anything as a semi-, or at all events pre-, socialist measure and 
are therefore secret devotees of protective tariffs, tobacco monopoly, 
nationalised railways, etc. These prevarications are the legacy of the 
unduly one-sided fight against Manchesterism '7° and, because they 
facilitate debate in a middle-class and ‘eddicated’ environment, enjoy 
a considerable following particularly among those bourgeois and aca- 
demic elements who have come over to us. You in Berlin, he tells me, 
recently debated the point, he being luckily outvoted. We cannot, for 
the sake of such minor considerations, afford to discredit ourselves 
either politically or economically. I tried to make him see that in our 
view 1. protective tariffs are quite the wrong thing for Germany (not, 
however, for America), because our industry has expanded and be- 
come a viable exporter under free trade, but for it to be a viable ex- 
porter, competition from foreign semi-manufactures on the home 
market is absolutely essential; that the iron industry, which produces 

* A paraphrase from Goethe’s ‘Der Schatzgraber’.-? See this volume, pp. 288-89. 

4 times more than is required by the home market, uses the protective 
tariff only against the home market while selling abroad, as the facts go to 
show, at give-away prices; 2. that the tobacco monopoly is nationali- 
sation on so minute a scale that it can’t even do duty for an example in 
the debate nor, for that matter, do I give a damn whether or not Bis- 
marck puts it into effect since dither way it must eventually redound 
to our benefit; 3. that the nationalisation of railways is of benefit only 
to the shareholders who sell their shares above value, but of no benefit 
at all to us because we should be able to deal as summarily with one 
or two big companies as with the state, once we had the latter; that 
the joint-stock companies have already provided proof of the extent 
to which the bourgeois as such is redundant, in as much as the man- 
agement is wholly in the hands of salaried officials, nor would nationa- 
lisation provide any further argument. However, he had got the thing 
too firmly fixed in his mind and agreed with me only to the extent of 
admitting that, from a political viewpoint, your dismissive attitude 
was the only correct one. 
Time for the post. Kindest regards to yourself and Liebknecht. 

Your 
F.E.