London, 12 October 1893 
Dear August, 

We are sending you Reeves’s edition of Woman. *” In my view the legal 
position (upon which the whole thing turns when you’re dealing with a chap 
like Reeves) is as follows: 

1. So far as the translator is concerned, international copyright provides 
protection for three years from the publication of the original, but only if 
during the first year the first part of a translation authorised by the author 
has actually appeared in print. Accordingly you would have absolutely no 
claim unless Walther’s* translation had appeared within one year of the 
publication of a new German edition containing substantial alterations and 
additions not contained in the earlier one; this was hardly the case. 

2. There remains Mrs Adams Walther’s claim. Whether she has any 
depends on whether, upon the publication of the first English edition, she 
reserved the Copyright or whether she expressly or tacitly assigned it to the 
publishers, the Modern Press. This should be ascertained. If she did not 
expressly reserve it then, legislation over here being what it is, it is ten 

“ Adams Walther 

to one that it was tacitly assigned to the publisher and that consequently she 
too no longer has any claim. 

3. So far as I know, the latter, one Foulger, had long since had to wind up 
his business and was no doubt glad to come to any sort of agreement with 
Reeves. 

Accordingly it is almost certain that you cannot do anything in the legal 
line, nor is it at all likely that Mrs Adams Walther can do anything either, but 
this should be ascertained. If you could procure me a copy of the agreement 
between Mrs Walther and the Modern Press I could, if necessary, consult a 
lawyer. But unless everything is absolutely cut-and-dried there’s nothing to 
be done with a laddie like Reeves; in his speculative enterprises he is as 
unscrupulous as they come, and getting money out of him is a virtual 
impossibility; I, too, have unfortunately had dealings with him, and not even 
the threat of a lawsuit is of any real avail. In cases such as these, laddies of 
his stamp generally make over everything to their wives or concoct a BILL OF 
SALE (assigning their stock, etc., to a fictitious or genuine creditor). 

Yesterday we got two splendid bits of news. 

First, the beginning of the end of the pit strike. After the lock-out of the 
workers, engineered by the big colliery owners on 28 July: 1. in order to raise 
prices and curtail production, 2. so that ruinous contracts, carelessly entered 
into, for a year’s supply of coal to gasworks and other municipal 
undertakings could be broken with impunity because, in all such contracts, 
strikes provide indemnity against breach of contract, 3. to depress wages and 
4. to ruin the small mining companies and buy them up at knock-down 
prices—this is coming increasingly to be the permanent motive behind all big 
LOCK-OUTS—well then, after the said lock-out had been going on for over 
two months and public opinion among the middle classes, who had been hit 
by the coal shortage, had also begun to turn—against the mine owners, things 
came to a head. During the first week of October the agreement expired 
whereby the mine owners had undertaken, on pain of a £1,000 fine, to re- 
open their pits, but only if wages were reduced by a full 25 per cent (of the 
former wage plus the 40 per cent increase gained after 1889, i.e. at the 1889 
wage plus 15 per cent), and on condition of the strike’s being called off by 
the miners’ committee. A number of the smaller collieries immediately 
defected and resumed work at the pre-/uly wage (i.e. at the 1889 wage, plus 
the 40 per cent increase). The mayors of the larger towns in the Yorkshire 
and Midlands mining districts then 

foregathered and proposed a settlement which, in fact, boiled down to a 10 
per cent reduction in wages. Had the masters accepted, this could have been 
dangerous as it might have placed the workers on the horns of a dilemma— 
either they, too, accepted or they risked turning against themselves a public 
opinion that is always fickle and ready to applaud any kind of compromise. 
But luckily the MASTERS—the big ones in the lead—were deluded enough to 
refuse forthwith, and within twenty-four hours the collapse of their ring was 
manifest to all. As from yesterday some thirty or forty thousand miners have 
returned to work at the pre-July wage, which means that the masters have 
totally renounced their demands and the hash of the colliery-owners’ ring has 
been well and truly settled. This is the first instance in which a big strike, set 
on foot by the masters themselves at a time of their own choosing, has gone 
so completely awry, and therein lies its significance. It will be some time 
before they try the same thing again, but the workers have themselves 
suffered so much and endured such poverty that they, too, are unlikely to 
have much stomach left for a ‘general strike’. 

(Have just got yours and Julie’s letter.) 

The second piece of news was about the new Austrian Electoral Reform 
Bill. °” It is a resounding victory for our people and I hastened to 
congratulate Victor upon it.* The Daily News thinks that the number of voters 
in Vienna will rise from 80,000 to 350,000, while the Chronicle estimates the 
number for Austria as a whole at three million—these estimates come, of 
course, from Viennese sources. At all events it’s a bonus that is not to be 
sneezed at. The bourgeois in Vienna are already thinking in terms of twenty 
Social Democrat deputies. 

It’s more than probable that Taaffe is counting on his Bill being changed 
for the worse by Parliament, but it’s a long shot and our chaps will see that 
he doesn’t get away with it. What a delicious quirk of history if it should so 
turn out that our chaps have to protect the Prime Minister against his 
Parliament and against his own secret self! The main thing is that the ball has 
at last started rolling and in Austria our movement is powerful enough to 
prevent its being brought to a halt. And Taaffe cannot very well suppress 
demonstrations in support of his Bill. 

From my general impression of Austria, I should say that that country will 
give us much cause for rejoicing in the immediate future. What with 

“ See previous letter. 

the general prostration of all the parties, the general perplexity, the feuding 
over nationalities, what with a government that never knows what it wants 
and lives only from hand to mouth, what with laws that exist for the most 
part only on paper and the general sloppiness of the administration—of 
which I have, from my own observation, only recently got any real idea— 
what with all these things, a party which knows what it wants and how to get 
it, which genuinely wants it and is possessed of the required tenacity, is 
bound in the long run to prove invincible especially when, as in this instance, 
all its demands follow the same trend as the economic development of the 
country as such and are no more than the political expression of that 
development. Our party in Austria *” is the only living force in the field of 
politics; otherwise there is nothing but passive resistance or new ventures 
that never come to anything, and this places us in an exceptionally 
favourable position in Austria. Furthermore, the changes that occur in the 
grouping of the bourgeois parties sometimes make it impossible for the 
government to be Conservative and, when it ceases to be Conservative, it 
simply becomes unpredictable, if only by reason of the fact that the party 
groupings of which it has to take account are likewise unpredictable. And 
again, the Austrian government is that of a great power which, though in 
decline, is nevertheless still a great power and, as compared with Prussia, a 
small power in the ascendant, is still capable of remarkable initiatives at such 
times as conservatism, sheer clinging to the status quo, ceases to be possible. 
That is my explanation for Mr Taaffe’s ‘leap in the dark’. 

Another fact to be considered is that the growth of the proletarian 
movement in all countries is about to precipitate a crisis and that in conse- 
quence any successes one country may achieve will react powerfully upon 
all the others. The suffrage movement won its first victory in Belgium *”° and 
now Austria is about to follow suit. At the outset this will ensure the survival 
of universal suffrage, but also encourage us to make further demands—in 
Germany no less than in France and Italy. The way was paved for the 
February Revolution* by Switzerland’s internal struggles and _ the 
constitutional upheavals in Italy. Again, the Sonderbund War *” and the 
bombardment of Messina” by the Neapolitans *” (Feb. 1848) were the 
immediate signal for the outbreak of revolution in Paris. Maybe the crisis 
will not be upon us for some five or six years yet, but I should say that the 

* of 1848 in France - ° a slip of the pen in the original; it should read Palermo 

preparatory role will this time fall to Belgium and, in particular, Austria, 
while the dénouement will take place in Germany. 

There is no fear that the cause will ever again be dropped in Austria; our 
people in that country will see to that. The Austrian Diet is an infinitely more 
stagnant froggery than the German Reichstag or even the Saxon or the 
Bavarian Chamber. The presence of a dozen Socialist deputies will have a far 
more galvanic effect there than it would in our case, and we are exceptionally 
lucky in having in Victor a chap who has so clear a conception of the 
complexities of conditions in Austria and is able to subject them to so 
incisive an analysis. His speech in the last Arbeiter-Zeitung is a real tour de 
force." 

Ede and Gina were here this morning. He isn’t yet at all as he should be, 
has a mania for splitting hairs and increasingly recalls the sagacity of his 
Volks-Zeitung uncle; I often get the impression that old Aaron” in person is 
standing before me. It was he who spoilt things for himself in Switzerland. 
Having been told in Berne that one of them but not both at once would be 
admitted, he should have realised that the best policy would be to give 
precedence to Julius, as an invalid and, banking on this, to return six months 
later, when they could hardly refuse him admittance, at least for any length of 
time. But this his impatience would not brook. The best of it is that he now 
sometimes avers he would prefer to stay here and that it’s Gina who wants to 
go to Switzerland. His dream is, as it always will be, to go back to Berlin. He 
really imagines this to be possible and is always consulting lawyers about it. 
Remains to be seen! 

If Schliiter has any sense he will do himself and his wife the kindness of 
starting divorce proceedings. A suit of this kind against an absent wife for 
deliberate desertion has few disadvantages for either party, and after all he 
too must wish for complete freedom. This is not, of course, to say that he 
hasn’t in any case been accustomed to enjoying that freedom whenever op- 
portunity arose. It is always satisfactory, by the way, to hear that a woman 
one knows is plucking up the courage to make herself independent. The 
decision to part from her Hermann for good may have cost her many a 
mental struggle and she may thus at one time have given the impression of 
being by nature irresolute. What an expenditure of energy bourgeois marriage 
demands—first until one has got to that stage, then for so long as the 
nonsense lasts and then until one is finally done with it. 

* fine specimen - ° Aaron Bernstein 

We have just come back from a walk in the park—glorious autumn 
weather, a pretty sunset in a cloudless sky and beautifully coloured foliage. 
Downstairs the table is being laid; we are having Welsh mutton dressed as 
venison, accompanied by good old noodles. So I must hurry up and finish 
this. Louise and I thank Julie for her kind letters and are saving up our 
answers for next time. Warm regards from us both to both of you, likewise to 
Singer and his sister, to the Liebknechts and all our dear friends whose names 
I cannot list if the joint is not to grow cold. 

Yours, 
F. Engels