Eastbourne, 27 August 1883 
4 Cavendish Place 

Dear Bernstein, 

Herewith money order for £4 for old Becker.’ I am still hoping that 
the news——and it wouldn’t be the first time—-is being exaggerated 
by his family. But he is, of course, very old, has been through a great 
deal and, or so I was told by Mme Lafargue, looked considerably 
older last year in Geneva by comparison with his hearty appearance 
at The Hague. 

I shall not be able to write a great deal today. The post leaves here 
at one o’clock in the afternoon and here beside me, for proof-reading, 

lies sheet 19 of Capital,” which also has to go off. 
@ Johann Philipp Becker-° of the third German edition of Volume I of Capital 

Many thanks for your suggestion about Kaler-Reinthal,°° but 
I cannot, unfortunately, take advantage of it. With the exception of 
trifles, all my extra jobs are of a kind that call for my personal atten- 
tion. And in so far as I could pass anything on, it would have to be to 
a man who spoke coulant* English and was intimately acquainted 
with London and local conditions, thus being able to save me run- 
ning errands. 

I am staying here until about 12 September,? until when the 
above address holds good; then back to London. 

Besides proofs and arrears of correspondence, I must, while here, 
attend to: 

1) Deville’s ms., French popularisation of Capital. 

2) Ms., part of the English translation,” both of them sorely in 
need of revision. So you see, no peace here either. Luckily I live right 
next to the sea and sit besides an open window through which the sea 
air comes wafting in. 

I was very sorry that you didn’t come over here. I had a number of 
things to discuss with you. We have in any case got to resign ourselves 
to the fact that some of Marx’s unpublished works will have to appear 
abroad‘ and you alone could give me practical information or sugges- 
tions relating to this; it is, however, something that has to be discussed 
verbally — by letter it would be endless. But please say nothing about 
this, otherwise it might arouse false hopes in the people who run the 
printing works out there; my experience of party presses is such that 
I would think twice before entrusting a major and important work to 
any of them. 

I shall retain the money order here, it being expressly stated 
thereon that it is of no use to the recipient. I gave your address, 137 
alte Landstraße Riesbach, from memory; if wrong, please put this 
right at the main post office in Zurich. 

My suggestion about the impudent ms. was, as it were, a bad joke. 
So long as the Anti-Socialist Law is in force,?7 and the Sozialdemokrat 
is the only possible organ, it is imperative not to sow discord among 
the party merely for the sake of such secondary issues, and that is 
what would happen if one sought to make a ‘question of principle’ 
out of this issue. 

4 fluent-° of the first volume of Capital (see Note 56)-° See this volume, p. 17.- 
4 Tbid., p. 37. 

It would seem to me that, in the treatment of the ‘republic’, espe- 
cially in France, the most important aspect did not emerge clearly 
enough in the Sozialdemokrat,?! namely this: 

In the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, the Bo- 
napartist monarchy (the characteristics of which have been expound- 
ed by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire and by myself in The Housing 
Question, II, and elsewhere) adopted a role similar to that of the old 
absolute monarchy in the struggle between feudalism and bourgeoi- 
sie. But just as that struggle could not be fought out under the old, ab- 
solute monarchy but only under a constitutional one (England, 
France 1789-92 and 1815-30) so, too, that between bourgeoisie and 
proletariat can only be fought out in a republic. Inasmuch, then, as 
the French were helped by favourable conditions and revolutionary 
antecedents to overthrow Bonaparte and establish a bourgeois repub- 
lic,°? they have the advantage over us, who remain stuck in a farrago 
of semi-feudalism and Bonapartism, of already possessing the form in 
which the struggle must be fought out and which we must first master 
for ourselves. Politically they are a whole stage ahead of us. Hence, 
the inevitable consequence of a monarchist restoration in France 
would be that the struggle for the restoration of the bourgeois republic 
would again appear on the agenda; continuance of the republic, on 
the other hand, means mounting intensification of the direct, un- 
disguised class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie until 
a crisis is reached. 

Similarly in our case the first, immediate result of the revolution 
can and must, so far as form is concerned, be nothing other than a bour- 
geois republic. But in this instance it will be no more than a brief, 
transitional period since fortunately we do not possess a purely repub- 
lican bourgeois party. A bourgeois republic with, perhaps, the Party 
of Progress °° at the helm, will serve us at first to win over the great mass 
of the workers to revolutionary socialism — which will have been effected 
in a year or two— and will be conducive to the thorough erosion and 
self-destruction of all possible intermediate parties but not ours. Only 
then can we successfully take over. 

The great mistake made by the Germans is to imagine the revolu- 
tion as something that can be achieved overnight. In fact it is a pro- 
cess of development on the part of the masses which takes several 
years even under conditions that tend to accelerate it. Every revolu- 
tion that has been achieved overnight has merely ousted a reaction- 

ary regime doomed from the outset (1830) or has led directly to the 
exact opposite of what was aspired to (1848, France). 

Yours, 
F.E 
What do you think of this: 

‘The last so-called red number of the “Rheinische Zeitung’’* {third edition) of 19 May 
1849, which carried the Neue Rheinische Zeitung’s farewell message by Ferdinand 
Freiligrath at the top ofits front page, was again confiscated by the police here not long 
ago. A second-hand dealer had bought as waste paper a number of copies of this last 
farewell issue of the sometime organ of democracy and was selling them at 10 pfennigs 
a piece. The police put a stop to this by confiscating such of the papers as the dealer still 
‘had left. If the confiscation was effected on the grounds that the sheet’s wretched pale 
red print was bound to harm its readers’ eyes, the public has cause to thank the police;