London, 8 October 1888 

Dear Dr Schmidt, 

I should have answered your letter of 2 February long since had I 
known where to write to. I had been daily expecting news of your 
successful Habilitation* in Switzerland and hence of your removal to 
Zurich or Berne. Finally I took it with me to America, which I visited 
last August and September in company with Dr Aveling and his wife and 
Schorlemmer, but once again did not get round to answering it during 
the trip and now, on my return, I find a further message from you dated 
23 August (on which day I was battling with mosquitoes in New York, 
much more dangerous adversaries than all your German professors of 
political economy put together). 

Your account of the adventures attending your Habilitation bring 
back vivid recollections of the wretchedness of the German universities. 
That’s what passes as freedom of scholarship. It’s the old story of Bruno 
Bauer in the forties,’ except that we have come on a bit and now have 
not only theological and political heretics but economic ones also. Still, 
I trust that Thucydides?” is in a humane mood and won'’t place any seri- 
ous difficulties in your way in Leipzig. 

I was most interested to learn that a ‘confessional’ university still 
actually exists in Germany.””” What odd things the ‘reborn’ fatherland 
continues to harbour! 

I am very anxious to hear about your work. Apart from yourself, 
Lexis also tried to solve the problem to which I am obliged to revert in 
my preface to Volume III of Capital?*> That you should finally have 
arrived at Marx’s viewpoint in the course of your studies doesn’t surprise 
me at all; I believe that this would happen in the case of anyone who 
tackled the matter painstakingly and with an open mind. After all, many 
professors nowadays, exploiting Marx as they do, have trouble enough 
in maintaining a more or less seemly distance between themselves and 

4 Qualification for lecturing at universities 

Letters ~ 1888 221 

conclusions that are necessarily bound up with what they have annexed, 
while others, as the passage you extracted from our Thucydides goes to 
show,?”? must needs relapse into utter puerility to provide any sort of 
answer at all! 

If, as I hope, my eyesight lasts out—my American jaunt did me a 
power of good—Volume III? will be ready for the press this winter and 
in a year’s time will hit that company like a bombshell. I have broken off 
or postponed all my other jobs so as finally to be done with it and am 
exceedingly hard pressed. The greater part is almost ready for the print- 
ers, but two or three of the seven sections need a great deal of revision, 
especially the first, of which there are two versions. 

I found America most interesting. It is a place one really must have 
seen with one’s own eyes, this country whose history goes back no 
further than commodity production and which is the promised land of 
capitalist production. People’s usual conceptions of it are as false as those 
a German schoolboy has of France. There was also much natural beauty 
to be enjoyed at Niagara, on the St Lawrence, in the Adirondacks and on 
the smaller lakes. 

I have read Platter’s critique of G. Cohn.» The beginning is very good 
and witty, but further on the good Platter runs out of steam. 

Over here all is much as it was, save that the four people expelled 
from Zurich‘ have arrived, and Aveling is now writing plays which have 
been very well received by the impresarios. He was sent to America to 
rehearse 3 of his plays over there. 

I still have a whole pile of letters to answer and if I miss this post I 
fear I shall be interrupted, so I had better close straight away. Goodbye 
and let me have further news of you very soon, by which time I trust 
you will have been duly installed as a lecturer. 

Yours very sincerely, 
F. Engels