London, 11 November 1882 

Dear Moor, 

I was able to show Tussy your letter* on the evening it arrived, for 
in the morning Lenchen and Johnny had gone to Percy’s” orrice to 
watch the Lorp Mayor's Suow and in the evening we all foregathered 
at Pumps’s for pinner. Johnny was very charming and Pumps’s gos- 
ling very well-behaved. 

tam very glad you should have found a pleasant doctor 5 it is al- 
ways better ifa convalescent has someone like that at hand, and what 

* See this volume, pp. 364-67.-° Rosher-* James M. Williamson 

good can it do if every trifle must first be referred back here? I trust 
the rheumatism and cough are now on the mend. 

Today I am sending you 2 Egalités and one weekly ditto. The 
manifesto of the (Lyons) Conseil national *%° will convince you that 
the Lyonnais are still the typical louts they have always been. No 
further news about the progress of the negotiations with the Parisian 
capitalist,+?% so nothing would appear to have been settled yet. 

The rudeness with which Dilke replies to awkward questions *°° is 
indeed striking, but seems very much to the taste of the bunch of lib- 
eral parvenus who sit behind him. Well, they'll feel the cléture+*#37 
soon enough. The business in Gibraltar *!? stinks more every day; the 
extradition was ordered, not only by the police, but also by a mag- 
istrate, i.e. a judge, and the Governor reads about it in the paper and 
doesn’t lift a finger! Meanwhile the Russians are encroaching more 
and more on Persia and Afghanistan and building roads to Meshed 
in Persia and from Samarkand via Bukhara to Balkh (the Bactria 
of the Ancients) in Afghanistan, while their intrigues in Turkey are 
such that not even Aleko Pasha, their protégé in East Rumelia, can 
swallow them. But neither big Gladstone nor little Dilke have any 
eyes for this. The Russians certainly have something in mind for next 
spring. But the kind of credit they enjoy will be evident to you from 
the announcement of the Poti-Baku Railway’s Preference Loan. 
They have to use a company as a cloak and, moreover, on what 
terms! 

Vollmar has opened his pro-Malon campaign in the Sozzaldemo- 
krat—- Malon’s promptings being instantly recognisable in the sac- 
charine tone of the apologia with which the article concludes.*?? 
But what do you think of Wilhelm’s> panegyric of Bennigsen in the 
Justice? It’s really laid on a bit thick, even for the worthy Wilhelm. 

The Swiss Factory Act *°? also goes off in today’s parcel. I shall ask 
Bernstein for Oldenburg’s article‘ at the earliest opportunity. Bern- 
stein will probably think twice before writing to me; I made such 
good use of his own arguments to refute his conclusions concerning 
the French business that he is unlikely to find very much more to say.* 

Now, with the closure of the debate, the House of Commons has 
sunk wholly to the level of a continental Chamber which, in view of 
its present composition, is the position best suited to it. 

@ closure-> Presumably Wilhelm Liebknecht.-* See this volume, p. 365.-¢ Ibid., 
pp. 354-57, 360-62. 

I am very curious to hear more about the experiment made by 
Deprez at Munich.*?© However, I completely fail to understand 
how, in that case, laws for estimating resistance in wires hitherto 
regarded as valid and still applied in practice by engineers (in their 
calculations) can continue in force. Hitherto it has been calculated 
that, given the same conductive material, resistance increases in pro- 
portion as the diameter of the conducting wire decreases. I wish 
Longuet could be induced to cough up those things. For this means 
that the vast and hitherto untapped sources of hydraulic power have 
suddenly become exploitable. 

But now I must pack up the papers. All well here. 

Your 
F.E.