London, 19 February 1892 

Dear Victor, 

I was on the point of replying the other day to the letter you wrote 
me from Salo, when I was badly balked. Owing to the publisher’s* 
malice, stupidity, or both, Aveling’s translation of my Entwicklung des 
Sozialismus,” which I was supposed to revise while still in manuscript 
form, had already been set up and came to me in complete, made-up, 
paginated proof. In view of the law in this country which delivers up 
the author to the publisher bound hand and foot, I ran the risk of the 
thing coming before the public as it stood and thus of incurring dis- 
credit, for the ms. was only a rough draft. So everything else had to be 
left undone until the thing had been revised and the publisher per- 
suaded by devious means to reconcile himself to the expenses for 
which he himself was to blame. Well, the worst is now over, and the 
first person to be sent a reply will be you. 

We were overjoyed to learn that your wife‘ is better and that her 
recovery may be confidently anticipated. You have enough work, tri- 
als and tribulations as it is, and the Austrian movement is in far too 
great need of every ounce of your strength for us not to have given 
a sigh of relief on hearing that the worst of your worries was over, in 
this respect at any rate. But you will, I hope, permit us to rejoice, not 
only as party members but also as your personal friends, at the pros- 
pect that, having made a complete recovery, your wife will shortly be 
restored to you and that so fine a woman as your Emma is not to suf- 
fer the terrible fate which for a moment seemed to hang over her. 

But if in the circumstances you succumbed to a mood which you 
yourself describe as dejected, it is only too understandable. Mean- 
while circumstances have, it seems, helped you Austrians out of the 
deadlock which you had feared, and with good reason. The proposed 
haphazard reconstruction of Greater Vienna provided you with an 
opportunity upon which you, with your habitual flair, instantly 
seized and duly exploited in accordance with the model originally 

2 Swan Sonnenschein-” Socialism: Utopian and Scientific -° Emma Adler 

placed before the Paris Municipal Council by Vaillant and our 
chaps.*!! (The Possibilists? did no more than hasten its passage 
through the Municipal Council by selling themselves to the bour- 
geois Radicals !*’ in return for services rendered in other spheres 
thus, in their low cunning, doing us a service and, what’s more, pav- 
ing the way for their own destruction.) So in what direction I am 
supposed to give you the ‘fillip’ requested, if not actually demanded, 
of me in a letter to Louise, I fail to see. The French have a peculiar 
knack of giving the right political form to demands of this kind, and 
that is what happened in this case. In this country, too, some of the 
French demands have been adopted by the London Gounty Counc, 
while others figure in the electoral manifestos of every Labour can- 
didate.*!? See The Workman’s Times of the past three weeks. Since the 
elections to the County Counci are to take place on 5 March, these 
manifestos are playing an important role just now, and The Work- 
man’s Times, which I hope you get regularly, will thus provide you 
with propaganda material of all kinds. And the business ought to be 
exploited to the utmost, first in the interests of agitation generally and 
of potential individual victories, and secondly and more particularly 
in order to eliminate the otherwise inevitable hostility between the 
workers of Vienna and the starveling coolie and sweated labour im- 
ported from abroad. This is a point you brought out particularly 
well. 

You will eventually get your daily paper, but it must in the main 
be your own creation. Considering the nature of your press laws, the step 
from weekly to daily would seem to me a very big one for which long, 
robust legs are required, and one which would also make you more 
vulnerable than ever to a government intent on ruining you by means 
of fines and legal costs. This is fresh proof of your government’s 
cunning — always greater in small matters. The Prussians are too stupid 
for that sort of thing, relying as they do on brute force, while your pol- 
iticlans are stupid only when it comes to doing anything big. Person- 
ally, I rather doubt whether, in view of the fines you would incur, 
you would be able to keep a daily going for as much as six months 
and, were it to collapse, the defeat would be hard to get over. 

But in order to do my bit for the Austrians, and since all my fees 
from stuffissued by the Vorwarts Publishers find their way willy-nilly 
into German party funds, I have decided that all fees from the stuff 
published by Dietz should go to you people and have instructed him ac- 
cordingly.153 

I feel sorry for Rudolf Meyer; to judge by your account and the 
news since received about his staying in Moravia instead of Palermo, 
he must be in a very poor way with his diabetes. For all his astonish- 
ing and often comical megalomania, he is the only Conservative to 
have risked anything for his social demagogic schemes and socialist 
sympathies and to have gone into exile because of them. And while in 
exile he has discovered that, though the Austrian and French aristo- 
crats might be far more gentlemanly in social intercourse than the rot- 
ten Prussian Junkers, they are no less tenacious in the pursuit of their 
rents, ambitions, etc. Things have come to such a pass that he, the 
only remaining genuine Conservative, is now vainly searching for 
men with whom he might found a genuine Conservative party. 

For the rest, affairs are taking a critical turn. In the German 
Reichstag a considerable crisis is brewing. Little Willie,* it seems, wishes 
for once to put his regis voluntas *!% to the test and is actually driving 
the deplorable members of the National Liberal Party *'* into the 
arms of the opposition; already there are signs of conflict. In addition, 
there is a ministerial crisis in France which is of great importance to 
us because Constans is rabidly anti-working class and his fall will 
bring about a number of changes in domestic affairs; also because the 
recurrence of instability in French government circles is very unwel- 
come to the Russian alliance which is in any case on its last legs. 

The enclosed appeared in the Critica Sociale.” 

Louise sends you the enclosed. She has spent the whole day disen- 
gaging oxygen — on paper; she is studying chemistry under circum- 
stances aggravated by the English textbooks and the absence of expe- 
riments...°