ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL*” 

London, 23 January 1890 

Dear Bebel, 

Congratulations on the Elberfeld acquittal? and no less on your bril- 
liant handling of the case, which emerged quite clearly despite the bad 
reporting. It was no small thing to steer your way through it as you did, 
with a train of 90 accused, including a Rollinghof>?? and, no doubt, a 
number of other worthless elements: but I don’t suppose that Mr Pinoff 
will ever want to see you confronting him from the dock again. So that 
chap is the ultimate of which the Prusso-German Public Prosecutor’s 
Office is capable. He interprets the law just as Bismarck does the 
Constitution, i.e. as an undergraduate in a pub interprets the students’ 
beer drinking ritual—the greater the uproar the better. It’s enough to 
make a French—not to mention English—lawyer’s hair stand on end. 

Today, no doubt, the Anti-Socialist Law will again be debated in 
Berlin.°** I think you are right when you say (in the Arbeiter-Zeitung*™) 

1569 

that, if Bismarck doesn’t cop it from this Reichstag, he’ll cop it from the 
next one; the ever-mounting tide of our votes will break the back of any 
and every bourgeois opposition. In this I do not see eye to eye with Ede. 
He and Kautsky—they both have something of a bent for ‘higher poli- 
tics’—believe that what we should aim for in the next elections is a 
majority hostile to the government. As though anything of the sort still 
existed among the bourgeois parties in Germany! The men of Progress** 
will disappear with the suspension of the Anti-Socialist Law; the bour- 
geois elements among them will go over to the National Liberals,>”° and 
the petty bourgeois and working men to us. That is why they will cry 
off every time it looks as though the Anti-Socialist Law might be thrown 
out. And in other respects also Bismarck will always obtain a majority; 
even though they may still show some tendency to bridle and jib in the 
first year, he’ll talk them round in the second and they are, after all, safe 
from their constituents for the next 5 years! But if Bismarck goes off the 
rails or otherwise disqualifies himself, it doesn’t really matter what sort 
of people (bourgeois, I mean, not Junkers) there are in the Reichstag; let 
the wind but shift and they are all equally capable of reviling their idols 
of yesterday. On this occasion, therefore, I can see absolutely no reason 
for mot repaying the Progress people in kind for their infamous behav- 
iour in 1887°%” and bringing it home to them that if they exist at all, it is 
only by courtesy of ourselves. It was Parnell’s decision in 1886 to get the 
Irish in England to vote everywhere against the Liberals and for the 
Tories, i.e. to abandon the role of a tame Liberal electorate for the first 
time since 1880, which, in the space of 6 weeks, turned Gladstone and 
the Liberal leaders into Home Rulers.*” And if ever something is to be 
made of the men of Progress, this can only be done by showing them ad 
oculos*—in the second ballot—that they are dependent upon ourselves. 
I am looking forward enormously to the actual elections.*”° For then 
our German working men will again show the world what finely 
tempered steel they are made of. It’s possible that you’ll have a new 
element in the Reichstag—labour representatives who are not as yet 
socialists. The movement amongst the miners*° will have given you an 
idea of the way in which the movement is progressing over here—a hith- 
erto indifferent stratum of the working class, largely proof against agita- 
tion, is being galvanised out of its lethargy by having to fight for its 
immediate interests and is virtually impelled into the movement by the 

4 plainly 

bourgeoisie and the government, which, in present circumstances and 
provided we don’t insist on precipitating matters, means that they are 
impelled into our arms. It is much the same here, save that they have 
behind them, not a powerful socialist party, but only small cliques, at 
variance amongst themselves and for the most part led by ambitious 
men of letters or poetic dreamers. But here, too, things are proceeding 
inexorably and it is precisely these people, now coming over to us en 
masse, who will soon make short work of the cliques and create the 
unity that is needed.—In our case this new element lends added inter- 
est to the elections. 

I have just received your Hamburg speech but shall not be able to 
read it till after luncheon. 

The French are making a collection for your election fund, though I 
doubt that very much will come of it; the point is that it’s an interna- 
tional gesture. 

Unless something unforeseen happens, peace would seem assured so 
far as this year is concerned—thanks to the tremendous advances in 
technology whereby every new gun, every new type of gunpowder, etc., 
is already obsolete even before it can be introduced into so much as one 
army, and thanks to the universal fear of unleashing these vast masses of 
men and powers of destruction, of which no one can say what their 
effect would be in practice. Thanks also to the French and the way they 
have dropped Boulanger, who was in the pay of Russia (they’d put 15 
million francs at his disposal), thereby eliminating all prospects of a 
restoration of the monarchy (that being the only purpose Boulanger was 
supposed to serve). But neither the Tsar? nor Russia’s diplomats care to 
embark on anything they are not sure of attaining; an alliance with the 
Republic is to them too dubious—the Orléans would better suit their 
book.! Nor does the anti-Turkish campaign launched by Gladstone for 
the benefit of his Russian friends” cut any ice here and, since Gladstone 
is not yet in office and the Tory government is decidedly pro-German, 
pro-Austrian and anti-Russian, the Little Father will have to bide his 
time. But we are indeed sitting upon a live mine and a spark would be 
enough to set it off. 

Our people’s Paris daily, already advertised by Liebknecht in German 
newspapers, has not yet been born—the birth pangs still continue. 
The matter will probably be decided within the next 2 or 3 weeks. At all 

4 Alexander III 

events, now that we have a group in the Chamber, the outlook is far 
more promising and in due course the Possibilists and Boulangists will 
again be vanquished in Paris. In the provinces, we alone of all the social- 
ists reign supreme. 

You people will be unlikely to get much money from America too. 
Au fond,? not a bad thing. A genuinely American party is of far greater 
use to you and the world generally than the few pence you used to get, 
precisely because the so-called party over there was not a party but a 
sect, and a purely German sect at that, a branch on foreign soil of the 
German party and of its specifically Lassallean and outmoded elements 
in particular. But now the Rosenberg clique has been thrown out! and, 
with it, the greatest obstacle to the development and rise of a genuinely 
American party. 

Cordial regards to yourself and your wife, 

Your 
EE.