IN BORSDORF NEAR LEIPZ1G ** 

London, 18 January 1884 

Dear Bebel, 

At last 1 have recovered sufficiently to spend at least a few hours 
a day at my desk and thus fulfil my obligations in regard to letter- 
writing. The thing was neither serious nor painful, but damned tedi- 
ous and génant,* and I shall have to take great care of myself for some 
little while yet. 

You will have received my letter about Miss Issleib written in bed 
in pencil. Since I have heard nothing more, I can only suppose the 
matter has been dropped.!*!—I dictated to Kautsky, who happened 
to be on the spot,'?° a letter to Liebknecht °° which I hope he has re- 
ceived and shown to you as requested. From it you will have seen that 
I am under no illusions as to the American business,” nor was I in any 
way inclined to give you the impression that I regarded the thing as 
absolutely essential. But I still maintain that, if it is to succeed, you 
two must go and no one else. Whether you can do so, I have abso- 
lutely no idea you will know best. But this much is certain—no 
amount of American money will make good the damage that will in- 
fallibly be done if, after the manner of Fritzsche and Viereck, the 
emissaries again water down the party’s viewpoint into a semblance 

a 

inconvenient -? See this volume, p. 14. 

of vulgar democracy and homespun philistinism.*’? And your pres- 
ence would certainly be the best guarantee that nothing of the sort 
would happen. 

I was delighted by the good news you sent me about the move- 
ment’s progress. The government could not, in fact, have hit on any 
better means of keeping the movement going and intensifying it than 
by everywhere involving our chaps in these violent local struggles 
with the police, particularly when the police in Germany is made up 
of such worthless characters that our lads can turn the enemy’s own 
weapons against him and take the offensive. And if, on top of that,— 
as recently in Berlin— the police are confused by constantly chang- 
ing instructions from above, so much the better. 

Should there be any repetition of the attempt to bring ‘the right to 
work’ back into fashion,!*? I would write something about it in the 
Sozialdemokrat. I have discussed this with Kautsky*; but first I should 
like Geiser and Co. to commit themselves a bit, to produce something 
tangible for us to go on, though Kautsky maintains that they won’t. 
These ne’r-do-well students, shop assistants, etc., are the bane of the 
movement. They know less than nothing and are, for that very rea- 
son, reluctant to learn anything at all; their so-called socialism is 
nothing but philistine hot air. 

Whether you will rid yourselves of the emergency article, I can- 
not say; there will always be the pretext that only in this way is it 
possible to protect the person of old William,” a phrase before which 
all Philistia will grovel on their bellies. 

Many thanks for your book Die Frau.'** I read it with great interest 
and there is much in it that is very good. What you say about the dev- 
elopment of industry in Germany is particularly good and clear. 
This is a matter to which I, too, have again been turning my atten- 
tion of late and I would, given the time, write something about it for 
the Sozialdemokrat. Odd, how the philistines fail to realise that the 
‘plague of vagabonds’ they so lament is, in the present state of agri- 
culture and handicrafts in Germany, the inescapable consequence of 
the rise of large-scale industry, or that, because Germany is always 
the last to arrive on the scene, the development of this selfsame large- 
scale industry can only take place there under the constant pressure 
of poor business conditions. For the Germans are only able to com- 

* See this volume, p. 55.- William I 

pete by paying lower wages, depressed to starvation level, and by reg- 
ularly exploiting to the utmost the cottage industry that forms the 
background to manufacturing industry. The transformation of han- 
dicrafts into cottage industry and the gradual transformation of cot- 
tage industry, in so far as this pays, into manufacturing and machine- 
ry~—such is the present trend in Germany. So far, the only large- 
scale industry proper we have is iron; in the textile industry — thanks 
to starvation wages and the fact that weavers possess potato plots — 
the hand-loom still prevails. 

In this country, too, industry has taken on a different character. 
The ten-year cycle would seem to have been disrupted since 1870, 
when American and German competition began to destroy England’s 
monopoly of the world market. Since 1868 business has been slack in 
the main branches, while production has been gradually increasing; 
and now, here and in America, we appear to be on the eve of another 
crisis which has not, in England, been preceded by a period of prosper- 
ity. That is the secret behind the sudden emergence of the socialist 
movement over here —~ sudden, although it has been slowly maturing 
for the past 3 years. Organised labour — trape unions — has, as yet, no 
sort of connection with it; the movement proceeds under ‘educated’ 
elements of bourgeois origin, some of whom seek to make contact 
with the masses and occasionally succeed in so doing. Morally and in- 
tellectually, these elements vary considerably and it will be some time 
before they sort themselves out and the position becomes clear. But 
the thing is hardly likely to fizzle out again altogether. Henry George 
and his nationalisation of land '+* may well play a meteoric role be- 
cause this issue is of traditional significance over here — of real signifi- 
cance, too, owing to the vast dimensions of the big estates. But in the 
long run this by itself must cease to have any pull in what is the 
world’s leading industrial country. Besides, George is a bourgeois 
born and bred, and fis plan of meeting all state expenditure out of 
rent is merely a second edition of the Ricardian school’s plan, i.e. 
purely bourgeois. 

If you wish to study a model of state socialism, then take a look at 
Java. There the Dutch government has, on the basis of the old, com- 
munistic village communities, organised production as a whole along 
such nicely socialist lines, and so neatly assumed control of the sale of 
all produce that, apart from some 100 million marks for army and ci- 
vil service pay, there remains each year a clear profit of some 70 mil- 

lion marks for payment of interest to the luckless creditors of the 
Dutch state.* Bismarck is a mere child by comparison! 

One way or another, we shall have a Russian constitution in the 
course of this year, and then the fun will begin. 

Your 
F.E.