[Draft] 
[London,] 20 January 1893 
Dear citizen, 

It is with sincere satisfaction that I see from your letter of 25 December 
that the passage taken from your article on Becker* was distorted in trans- 
lation. *’ Indeed, I was amazed when I saw your name at the end of the 
article. I had heard you spoken of with truly paternal affection, and the 
expressions used in your article on Becker constituted a far too painful 
contrast. Unfortunately, you still let the public believe them to be yours, as 
the rest of the article also. 

As for what you have to say in the Volks-Tribtine concerning my obser- 
vations, this in no way changes my opinion. You must know that MM. the 
anarchists invented the slander about the conference held in Marx’s house ''* 
with the sole purpose of proving that Marx wished to secure his own 
preponderance by any means, fair or foul. You say that this is his domination 
over the delegates. For you this alleged fact is worth being 

* Johann Philipp Becker 

told. However, when I prove that it is false, you say that is a mere detail of 
no importance whatsoever. 

I have proved the falsehood of your assertion. You said that the London 
conference placed the Jurassians under the command of the Geneva Federal 
Council. I find that to be the opposite of the truth. You reply: ‘What I said 
seems to me today to be the absolute truth. “You remind me of good man- 
ners, though I do not know in what respect: do you wish me to remind you of 
sincerity? 

Your No. XII * proves once again that you know almost nothing about 
what happened outside the anarchist milieu. Judging by your observations 
concerning the Geneva internationals, it would seem to me impossible that 
you have seen a complete collection of the Egalité de Genéve. If the Geneva 
internationals were to some extent infected by petty-bourgeois ideas, they 
shared this defect with their adversaries, the anarchists, whom you prefer, yet 
who offer only the reverse of the petty-bourgeois coin, and with almost all 
the French and Belgian internationals—Proudhonists with few exceptions. Of 
all the groups of the Romance languages, only those among the Spanish 
supporters of the General Council were Social-Democrats in the present 
sense of that term. As for the rest, have those of Geneva proved today that 
they are worth more than their predecessors? 

In the same No. XII ,* you reproduce a large number of anarchist errors 
and lies, and you accord them a faith which, after my warning, should have 
lost some of its original naivety. You promise a second work on this same 
topic. I hope that, before engaging upon the matter, you will obtain some 
documents which shed light on the assertions and machinations of the 
anarchists, and which will certainly enable you to judge impartially. 
Otherwise you will oblige me to reply again. It is of little importance what 
the bourgeois newspapers have to say about the old International, but when 
its history is distorted even in party organs this is quite a different matter. All 
that I ask of you is that you should not write about a subject without having 
studied both sides, the documents on this side and on that. Our worker public 
has to snatch from its meals and its sleep the few hours that it can devote to 
reading: it therefore has the right to ask that everything we present should be 
the result of conscientious work, and not lead to futile controversies that it is 
impossible to follow. 

* A mistake in the original. Should read ‘XII I’. The reference is to article XII I.