London, 27 October 1882 

Dear Mr Bernstein, 

In great haste the finale of the Paris affair, for I can hardly suppose 
the Parisians send you these things—even we over here have to 
extract them from the chaps by force. 

Well, the Citoyen continued to appear under its old editors, while 
Lissagaray edited Le Citoyen et la Bataille with the aid of two anar- 
chists, Mals and Crié. On Friday evening Citoyen et Bataille made 
an attempt to have the Cztoyen confiscated (by the police) on ac- 
count of a Wanda Kryloff feuilleton, whereupon the proprietor of the 
old Citoyen, Blommestein, a Dutch financier and now Lissagaray’s 
associé,“ asserted his proprietorial rights. Having been warned in 

* Lilian Rosher-> Presumably Roesgen-° See this volume, pp. 343-44, 344-45. - 

q partner 

good time, they removed the feuilleton, and the police inspector 
who came to confiscate it had to go away discomfited. On Sunday, 
the editors of the Crtoyen et Bataille declared that, should further 
attempts be made to confiscate the Citoyen, they would resign en 
masse (all 3 of them). That same evening, Sunday, the Citoyen des 
deux mondes, as it had been called on legal advice, was confiscated for 
bearing an unauthorised title, again at Blommestein’s behest. On 
Monday, i.e. Tuesday morning, it reappeared as the Citoyen interna- 
tional and called upon the editors of the Cztoyen et Bataille to stand 
by their word and resign. Not them! Mals and Crié declared secretly 
that they at any rate would resign, but did not; Crié was arrested 
for alleged complicity at Montceau-les-Mines*°? and is now in 
quod. 

In the meantime, since the editors of the Citoyen would have gone in 
daily fear of its being confiscated unless they changed its name, the 
paper has, for the past 4 days, been calling itself L’Egalité, alongside 
which the weekly Egalité is to continue appearing. Where they are 
getting the money from I don’t know; it’s 3 weeks since we had any 
news of the chaps. Nor did we get an Egalité today. But since your 
Frenchman’s génie éminemment organisateur* manifests itself, especially 
in our friends’ case, in organising the most tremendous disorder, one 
cannot draw any conclusions from that. 

The attempt to kill the Cztoyen with the help of the judiciary and 
police has stripped Lissagaray of the last remnants of his disguise. He 
has combined stupidity and baseness in rare measure. 

Marx asks whether you could procure for him a copy of the Swiss 
Factory Act.*°? We should be greatly obliged if you could let us 
know in which year the Factory Act now in force in Germany was 
passed and whether it is a separate Act or part of the Imperial Trade 
Regulations. We should then be able to get hold of it. Marx needs it 
for the 3rd edition of Volume I° and promises in return to send you 
something every now and again for the Sozialdemokrat. In a few days 
he will be leaving for the Isle of Wight where, provided nothing unto- 
ward happens, he will spend the whole winter (5 or 6 hours’ journey 
from here). 

Your Mister Garcia is one of the many little democrats who scurry 
about London, and have a finger in every association. Their new cen- 
tral boss— or, as Stieber puts it, ringleader, +°* is a Barrister called 

* exceptional gift for organising-° of Capital 

Hyndman, a strongly democratic and ambitious man who unsuccess- 
fully stood for parliament in the recent elections. All these little folk 
have no one behind them but each other. They split up into all man- 
ner of sects and into a befuddled non-sectarian tail consisting of those 
who hail democracy in whatever guise. They are intent on impressing 
the world with their own importance. Hence the catalogues of un- 
known celebrities in Garcia’s articles. In most of them there are good 
intentions and to spare, but likewise the intention to cut a figure. 
Hence I would advise you to treat the chap’s letters with considerable 
reserve; after all, his principal aim is to elevate to the position of an im- 
portant party a small clique which has, for twenty years, remained 
one and the same nonentity, if under various names and in a variety 
of guises. But, or so it seems to me, the Sozzaldemokrat is not there in 
order to create a continental reputation for these busy nobodies. 
Herewith the card of one of the little associations of which Garcia is 
secretary and to which he recently invited me to lecture; I, of course, 
refused. 

I anxiously await the material on Bismarck.* If Marx goes away 
now, I shall set to work in earnest and, should I become engrossed in 
a lengthier piece of work’ which ought to have been finished long 
ago, I shall not be able to extricate myself at all quickly, and I should 
warn you in advance that in that case you will have to wait. If I had 
got the stuff.here, I could start in on it straight away and polish off 
this business first of all. Bebel promised but didn’t send anything 
and now is actually bound for prison where Liebknecht already is, *°° 
and there’s absolutely no hope of getting anything from the others. 

Encl. for Kautsky. 

Kindest regards, 

Yours, 
F.E.