London, 19 May 1885 

My dear Lafargue, 

‘The Lissagaray affair pleased me greatly and I trust he will be 
chucked out of the Bataille.39’7 The irony of history is without 
mercy, even to revolutionary stink-bugs. 

* K. Marx, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. - F. Engels, ‘On 
the History of the Communist League’. - ° F. Engels, Anti-Dihring. 

I must repent, must repent me, 
Where my sins were most committed? 

as good king Don Rodrigo said while snakes devoured his vital parts. 
Brousse at the head of a daily paper would be too comical, he would 
never last. It would be all he needed to cut his own throat. 

The idea that life is simply the normal mode of existence of albu- 
minous bodies and that as a result the protein of the future, if the 
chemists ever contrive to manufacture it, must display signs of life, 
appears in my anti-Duhring book where it is developed to some extent 
on page 60, etc.” By assuming responsibility for it Schorlemmer did 
a bold thing, for if it falls flat, the blame will be his, whereas if it 
catches on, he will be the first to give me the credit. Moreover 
your Grimaux must be an imbecile if he really said that 

‘we have nothing to show us how this initial movement is acquired whereby an al- 
buminoid is organised into a living cell’. 

So the good man appears to be unaware that there is a whole army 
of living things which are still very far removed from the organisation 
of a cell, being no more than ‘plasson’, as Haeckel has it,? albumi- 
noids that have no trace of organisation, yet are alive—— for example 
protamoebas, siphonales, etc. The poor albuminoid has probably 
worked for millions of years in order to organise itself into a cell. But 
your Grimaux doesn’t even see the point at issue. Moreover he 
betrays his ignorance of physiology still further by comparing with a 
primitive protoplasm, the source of all life on earth, a product as 
specialised as the egg of a vertebrate. 

We have had poor Harney here for the past 10 days. He suffers 
badly from chronic rheumatoid arthritis of a +° gouty nature. Nim 
has had her work cut out looking after him. If the weather improves 
he hopes to set off for Macclesfield on Saturday.’ On that same Satur- 
day we are expecting Sam Moore with his translation *— alas, as yet 
uncompleted. 

The 2nd volume has been printed with the exception of my pre- 
face, the proofs of which should arrive any day. The consignments 
sent to Danielson have so far all arrived and 7 sheets have been trans- 
lated.! I have dictated more than half of the 3rd volume, but two 

“ Engels quotes in Spanish. - F. Engels, Anti-Dihring, present edition, Vol. 25, 
pp. 75-77. - © E. Grimaux, “Les substances colloidales et la coagulation’, Revue 
scientifique, No. 16, 18 April 1885, p. 500. - “ E. Haeckel, Die Perigenesis der Plas- 
tidule..., Berlin, 1876, pp. 76, 77. - © more or less - § 23 May; see also this volume, 
p. 292. - § of the first volume of Capital (see Note 56) 

sections 39° are going to give me a fine old time. The one on bank cap- 
ital and credit is in such disorder as to strike terror into the heart of 
a better man than me, but that is how it is. I am now at land rent. It 
is quite superbly done. But this will entail even more work, for the 
manuscript dates from 1865 and I shall have to consult his extracts 
made between 1870 and 1878 both for the banks and for landed 
property in America and Russia. And there are not a few of them. 
This means that the 3rd volume will have to wait another year at 
least. 

The storm in a teacup that has disrupted our ranks in Germany °7* 
will doubtless calm down for the time being. Now that the Reichstag 
has been sent about its business, the gents of the ‘socialist group’ have 
dispersed. The Social Democrats have won a moral victory over the 
‘group’. But that is not the end of the matter and there may be a re- 
currence. Were it not for the Anti-Socialist Law,?’? I should have 
been in favour of an outright split. But so long as it is in force, it de- 
prives us of all our weapons while enabling the party’s petit-bourgeois 
section to reap all the benefit. And, in any case, it is not our business 
to provoke it. The thing was inevitable; it was bound to come sooner 
or later. But it would have come either later or under circumstances 
more favourable to ourselves had it not been for the incredible stupid- 
ities of Liebknecht, who has not only wavered between the two sec- 
tions and invariably protected the petit bourgeois, but has also been 
prepared on more than one occasion to sacrifice the proletarian na- 
ture of the party for a simulacrum of unity that is credible to no one. 
It would appear that his own protégés, the representatives of the pe- 
tit-bourgeois side, have now had enough of his double dealing. Lieb- 
knecht always believes what he says when he is saying it, but believes 
something quite different whenever he speaks to someone else. Over 
here he is all for revolution, over there all for circumspection. That 
won’t prevent his being on our side on the crucial day and telling us: 
Didn’t I always tell you so! This is between ourselves. A kiss for Laura. 

Yours ever, 

F. E.