London, 10 January 1889 

Dear Kugelmann, 

May I reciprocate with best wishes for a very Happy New Year to 
yourself, your wife and daughter.* 

I should be amused to see Soetbeer’s piece of sagacity> if you would 
be so good as to send it to me; the post office here would be unlikely to 
take exception to the marginal notes; all it bans is anything in the nature 
of a letter. 

4 Gertrud and Franziska Kugelmann — > H. Soetbeer, Die Stellung der Sozialisten 
zur Malthus’schen Bevölkerungslehre, Göttingen, 1886 

As regards the French peasants, the thing should be taken cum grano 
salis.? The cultivation of parcels of land was the rule in France as it was 
in Germany and Eastern Europe while, so far as acreage is concerned, 
farming on a large scale with corvée labour was relatively rare. As a 
result of the Revolution,*** the peasant gradually came into possession 
of his parcel of land, but he often for some time at least remained a nomi- 
nal tenant (without as a rule having to pay rent). What happened to 
state-owned land (much of which Napoleon and the Restoration 
returned to the aristocracy, the other part of it being purchased after 
1826 by the aristocracy with the help of the émigré milliard**”), and how, 
by 1830, small peasant landownership had reached its highest degree of 
development, is to be found in Avenel’s Lundis Révolutionnaires and 
Balzac’s novel, Les Paysans. Taine isn’t up to much.’ I haven’t read the 
Schweichel article.‘ 

The third volume? is going ahead slowly. 

My health was given a tremendous fillip by my American jaunt, but 
my eyesight is still not all it might be—slight but chronic conjunctivitis 
and increasing myopia in the left eye due to the displacement of the rear 
wall of the sclerotic as a result of strain. The first duty of a citizen is 
rest.?°8 

Your 
F. Engels