ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE |” 

London, 31 December 1892 

Dear Sorge, 
Just a line or two before the year ends. Your letters of 18 November and 16 

December received—many thanks. Did you get the parcel of books I posted 
to you in September, containing the Condition of the Working 

* See this volume, p. 47 - ° F. Engels’ nickname 

Class, new edition, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” translated by 
Aveling with an introduction by me? If not I shall send you another parcel by 
registered mail. 

Here, in old Europe, things are proceeding at a somewhat livelier pace 
than in your ‘youthful’ country which still can’t quite extricate itself from the 
hobbledehoy stage. It is remarkable, though perfectly natural, that in so 
young a country, which has never known feudalism and has from the outset 
grown up upon a bourgeois basis, bourgeois prejudices should be so firmly 
entrenched even in the working class. Indeed it is precisely his opposition to 
a mother country still garbed in feudalism that leads the American working 
man to suppose the traditional bourgeois economic system he has inherited to 
be by its nature something immutably superior and progressive, a non plus 
ultra. Just as in New England, where puritanism, precisely because it is the 
raison d’étre of the whole colony, has become a traditional heirloom and all 
but indistinguishable from local patriotism. However much the Americans 
may twist and turn, they cannot simply discount, as if it were a bill, what is 
beyond doubt a tremendous future, but will have to wait until it falls due; and 
precisely because that future is so great, their present must be largely taken 
up with preparations for it, a task which, as in any young country, is chiefly 
of a material nature and calls for a degree of conservative thinking, a clinging 
to traditions connected with the founding of the new nationality. The Anglo- 
Saxon race—those damned Schleswig-Holsteiners as Marx always called 
them—is in any case slow in the uptake, a trait its history both in Europe and 
in America (economic success and, on the whole, peaceful political 
evolution) has tended to foster. Here momentous events alone can be of any 
avail and if, in addition to the transfer—now almost complete—of state- 
owned lands into private hands, industry were to expand under a somewhat 
less hare-brained tariff policy and foreign markets be conquered, things might 
also go well for you people. In this country, too, the class struggles were 
more violent during the period of growth of large-scale industry and petered 
out precisely at the time of Britain’s undisputed industrial domination in the 
world; similarly in Germany the growth of large-scale industry since 1850 
has coincided with the rise of the socialist movement, and in America things 
are not likely to turn out any differently. It is the revolutionising of all time- 
honoured conditions 

“Both works were written by F. Engels. See vols. 4 and 25 of this edition. 

by the growth of industry which likewise revolutionises men’s minds. 

Furthermore, the Americans have long provided the European world with 
proof of the fact that the bourgeois republic is the republic of capitalist 
businessmen in which politics is merely a business transaction like any 
other—something which the ruling bourgeois politicians in France have long 
known and practiced on the quiet, and whose truth is at last being brought 
home to the French on a national scale by the Panama scandal. °’ Not that the 
constitutional monarchies can preen themselves on their virtue, for each has 
its own little Panama; England, the building society scandals of which one, ‘the 
Liberator’, has conscientiously ‘liberated’ vast numbers of small depositors of 
savings amounting to some £8 million '* ; Germany, the Baare scandals and 
Lowe’s “Jewish rifles’ '°° (which prove that the Prussian officer is, now as 
always, a thief, but in a very, very small way—the one thing that is modest 
about him); Italy, the Banca Romana, already an approximation of Panama, 
which has bought some 150 deputies and senators '”° and concerning which, 
so I am told, documents are shortly to be published in Switzerland; Schliiter 
should keep an eye out for anything about the Banca Romana that appears in 
the press. And in Holy Russia the Russian Prince Meshchersky waxes in- 
dignant over the indifference with which the Panama revelations are received 
in Russia, the only explanation for this being, he says, that Russian virtue has 
been corrupted by the example of the French, and that ‘we ourselves have more 
than one Panama here at home’. 

However, the Panama affair is the beginning of the end of the bourgeois 
republic and may soon place us in some very responsible positions. The 
whole of the opportunist *’ and the better part of the Radical gang *° are 
compromised up to the hilt; the government is seeking to hush things up but 
that is no longer possible, for documentary evidence is in the hands of people 
who wish to overturn those now in power: 1. The Orleans, 2. the former 
minister Constans, now out of the running because of revelations about his 
scandalous past, 3. Rochefort and the Boulangists, ° 4. Cornelius Herz who, 
being himself deeply involved in all manner of frauds, has plainly taken 
refuge in London merely in order to buy his way out by compromising his 
fellows. All these people have more than enough evidence against this 
thieving crew, but are holding back, firstly and more generally, so as not to 
expend all their powder at one go and, secondly, in order to give the 
government and the courts of law time to become hopelessly compromised. 
This is all grist to our mill; enough information gradually leaks out not only 
to keep the pot on the boil and 

run the dirigeants* increasingly onto the rocks, but also to allow time for the 
scandal and the revelations to do their work in the remotest parts of the 
country before the inevitable dissolution of the Chamber and the general 
elections which, however, ought not to come too soon. 

That things have very nearly got to the point at which our chaps in France 
will be the only possible rulers of the state is evident. But it mustn’t happen 
too quickly, our people in France being by no means ripe for leadership. As 
things are now, it is absolutely impossible to say what intermediate stages 
there will be in the meantime. The old Republican parties are compromised 
down to the last man, while the Royalists and Clericals, having sold Panama 
lottery tickets '°° on a vast scale, have identified themselves with that affair— 
if that idiot Boulanger hadn’t shot himself, he would now be cock of the 
walk. I should be curious to know whether the old unconscious logic of 
French history will again assert itself on this occasion. There are going to be 
a great many surprises. If only during the interval in which the air is being 
cleared, some general or other doesn’t seize power and foment a war; that is 
the only danger. 

In Germany the party’s undeviating, irresistible advance proceeds at a 
steady pace. Everywhere small successes provide proof of progress. If the 
Army Bill ”° is adopted more or less as it stands, there’ll be a new floodtide 
of malcontents coming to join our ranks. If the bill is thrown out, there’Il be a 
dissolution, a general election, and we shall get at least fifty seats in the 
Reichstag which, in a conflict, might often give us the deciding vote. At all 
events the struggle, while it may, perhaps, also break out in France, can only 
be fought to a finish in Germany. But it’s a good thing that Volume II I° is 
now at last to be completed—not that I can say when that will be. Times are 
growing unsettled and the wind is rising. 

A very Happy New Year from myself and Mrs Kautsky to you and your 
wife,° 

Your 
F. Engels