[London,] 23 May 1884 

Dear Kautsky, 

I trust you will have received the ms. of chapters 1-8 >; it went off to 
you yesterday by registered mail. As I have already suggested, I think 
the best thing to do, if you want to use some of it for the Neue Zeit, 
would be to take the chapter on the family with the exception of mo- 
nogamy.° It anticipates the latter to the extent necessary to produce 
a fairly well rounded whole. 

As to the ban, I have already written and told you that everything 
by me is banned on principle °; ‘Prussian Schnapps’ was a personal in- 
sult to Bismarck and, now that Richter has used it to concoct a policy 
of his own for schnapps,??° the schnapps and wrapping-paper man 
will henceforward give me no rope at all. Anyhow all your argu- 
ments 2?! fall to the ground with the successful endorsement of the 
Anti-Socialist Law ??? and with the banning of the Siddeutsche Post 
that immediately ensued.??% And the government can afford to be 
harsh when letting fly with its bans; proof of this is provided by the lib- 
eral press which is literally clamouring for vigorous action against 
us. You, as an Austrian, cannot possibly follow the reasoning that 

2 18 May-° of Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State-° See 
this volume, p. 135.-¢ See previous letter. 

goes on in the minds of people like Bismarck, Puttkamer & Co.; for 
that you would have to be familiar with the Prussian police regime 
before 1848; to restore this to full bloom by means of the Anti-Socialist 
Law is the prime motive of these Junker bureaucrats. Everything 
else— at home —is secondary. 

I have not yet heard anything further about the Dihrings that are 
stored here.* 

I have Rodbertus’ Kapital. Seems to be nothing in it. A repository 
of the most meagre material, endlessly repeated. 

The things from the archives are being carefully looked after at my 
house and I shall be punctilious about returning them.??* As soon as 
I have polished off the final chapter and put various other things — 
books, etc.—in the house in order, I shall tackle the 2nd volume of 
Capital— in the daytime; in the evenings I shall first of all revise your 
Poverty of Philosophy ! and do the notes and preface for it.” This ap- 
portionment is not only useful but absolutely essential, since one does 
not study Marx’s handwriting by lamplight for any length of time un- 
less one is intent on going blind. Moreover my critique of Rodbertus 
will be confined in the main simply to the accusation of plagiarism ??° 
and all the rest —his social salvationist utopias, rent, mortgage relief 
for the landed aristocracy, etc., only mentioned in passing. So you 
will have sufficient material to administer a sound thrashing to this 
little Pomeranian exploiter of cottagers,?? who might have become 
a second-rate economist had he not been a Pomeranian. Now that the 
milksops, who cling to us on the one hand and to the armchair social- 
ists °* on the other with the intention of protecting both their flanks, 
have, 4 la Freiarsch Thiiringer, played off the ‘great’ Rodbertus’ 
against Marx, and now that Adolph Wagner and other Bismarckians 
have actually elevated the same to the rank of prophet of careerist so- 
cialism,??”7 we have absolutely no cause to spare this prodigy invent- 
ed by Rodbertus himself and loudly extolled by Meyer (who knows 
nothing about economics and, in the former, possessed his own secret 
oracle). The man achieved absolutely nothing in the field of econom- 
ics; he had much talent, but always remained a dilettante and, above 
all, an ignorant Pomeranian and arrogant Prussian. The most he ever 

@ See this volume, p. 133.-° F. Engels, ‘Marx and Rodbertus’.-° Freiwald Thi- 
ringer (Max Quarck) -* In the original: ‘grauBen’ (South-German dialect). 

achieved was to present a number of neat and correct points of view, 
but he was never able to turn them to good account. How can a de- 
cent chap actually come to be regarded as the apostle of the careerists 
of Bismarckian socialism? It is history’s revenge upon this artificially 
inflated ‘prodigy’. 

Your news from Germany about internal matters is always very 
welcome. 

But now I must write to Ede. 

Your 
F.E.