London, 24 July 1885 

Dear Bebel, 

I shall try and see whether this letter finds you in Zurich on the 
26th, as you lead me to suppose. 

So far as I can see from here, the row in the party is taking just the 
course we wanted. Frohme has got his comrades into as nasty a fix as 
possible, which cannot but please us, but luckily Liebknecht is there 
to save their bacon; he has notified the Society over here that he will 
now go to Frankfurt and put everything to rights *?° but that should 
this fail, Frohme will have to be thrown out. The part being played 
by Liebknecht in all this business is the entertaining one of the hen 
that has hatched out ducklings: he had thought he was rearing ‘eddi- 
cated’ socialists and lo! what emerged from the eggs but a clutch of 
cits and philistines! And now the worthy hen would have us believe 
that it’s chickens after all, and not ducks, swimming about out there 
in bourgeois waters. Not that there’s anything we can do except take 
him for what he is, illusions and all, but at Offenbach, if one is to be- 
lieve the newspaper account, he really has gone a bit too far.*? Well, 
little will come of the whole affair save the party’s awareness that it 
harbours two tendencies, one of which determines the course taken by 
the masses, the other that taken by the majority of the self-styled 

leaders, and that these two courses must increasingly diverge. This 
will pave the way for an eventual split, and that is no bad thing. 
Our friends of the Right will think twice before promulgating 
another ukase. 

You have put your finger unerringly on Kautsky’s principal weak- 
ness. His youthful tendency to make hasty pronouncements has been 
further reinforced by the lousy methods of teaching history at univer- 
sities — particularly those in Austria. There, students are systemati- 
cally taught to produce historical papers with material which they 
know to be inadequate but are expected to treat as adequate, i.e. to write 
things they themselves must be aware are wrong but yet are supposed 
to regard as right. Kautsky, of course, began by doing this with consid- 
erable brashness. Then came literary life—- writing for money, and 
copiously at that. So that he had absolutely no idea what is meant by 
really learned work. He thus burnt his fingers badly on a couple of oc- 
casions, first with his demographic thing and later with his articles on 
marriage in primitive times. Indeed in the friendliest possible manner 
and without mincing my words, I told him as much, nor do I spare 
him in this regard, mercilessly criticising all his stuff from that point of 
view.*?” Luckily I am able to add by way of consolation that in my 
callow youth I did exactly the same thing, and that it was only from 
Marx that I learnt how one ought to work. In fact, it would already 
seem to have helped quite a lot. 

The articles in the Berlin Zeitung are undoubtedly by Mehring; I, 
for one, don’t know of anyone else in Berlin who writes so well.*?8 
The chap has a great deal of talent and a lucid brain, but he’s a cal- 
culating scoundrel and a born traitor. I hope you will bear this in 
mind should he return to our midst, as he surely will the moment 
times have changed.*** 

Walther and his wife came to see me, bringing with them papers 
with news of the row in the party. They are coming again on Sunday.” 

I sent off Capital II to you in Dresden as soon as it arrived. I have 
finished dictating the manuscript of III in so far as this was possible, 
and in the autumn, as soon as I have had a bit of a holiday and attend- 
ed to all manner of other urgent work, I shall embark on the final 
editing. However, my mind is at rest, the ms. is now available in a leg- 
ible hand and can, if the worst comes to the worst, be printed as it 
stands, even if I were to kick the bucket in the meantime. Until this 

* 26 July 

186.° Engels to Bebel. 24 July 1885 317 

had been done I was constantly on tenterhooks. Not that the editing 
of 3 very important parts, i.e. ?/, of the whole, won’t involve a hell of a 
lot of work. But it will all come right in the end, and I look forward to 
the hullaballoo it will create when it appears. In the autumn we shall 
see two peaceful revolutions—the elections in France and over 
here. 

In France, the scrutin de liste?7> invented by the out-and-out 
Republicans and introduced by the Gambettists so as to make sure of 
remaining perpetually in power by means of the enforced election of 
lawyers and journalists, especially Parisians, will probably lead to the 
wholesale ejection of the Gambettists and will almost certainly bring 
Clemenceau and the Radicals *?° to power, if not immediately, then in 
the near future. Of the bourgeois parties that now exist, they are the 
only remaining possibility. Clemenceau’s panacea is departmental and 
communal self-government, i.e. decentralisation of the administra- 
tion and abolition of bureaucracy. The very fact of embarking on this 
would, in France, be a revolution greater than any that has happened 
since 1800. But government by the Radicals in France means above 
all the emancipation of the proletariat from the ofd revolutionary 
tradition and a direct struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, 
i.e. the establishment of an ultimate, unequivocal state of hostilities. 

In this country the new suffrage 79° will completely upset the old 
state of the parties. The alliance between Whigs and Tories **° to 
form one big Conservative party, having for its basis landed property 
as a single whole rather than divided into two camps as hitherto, and 
comprising all the conservative elements of the bourgeoisie — banks, 
high finance, trade and some of the industries; alongside this, on the 
other hand, the radical bourgeoisie, i. e. the bulk of large-scale indus- 
try, the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a tail for the time be- 
ing, awakening once more to political life— that is a revolutionary 
starting-point such as England has not seen since 1689.*?' 

And on top of all that, old William,* now on his last legs. It prom- 
ises great things. You’ll see. 

Your 
F, E.