Marx-Engels Correspondence 1852
Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 20;
First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels and K. Marx, 1913.
Dear Frederic,
No more than a few lines, since a letter has just arrived from Bermbach in Cologne which I would like to be in your hands tomorrow. It is essential that you 1. send me a letter To the Editor of The Times on the Cologne affair, together with a few lines which I shall send in advance of the corpus delicti; 2. that you do the same in your own name to The Daily News although, of course, the actual corpus delicti, i.e. the insertion itself, will be signed ‘A Prussian’ or some such. I think that for The Times ‘Doctor’ and for The Daily News ‘Manchester Merchant’ would do better, i.e. have more chance of being accepted. Refer to people by their titles. Dr Becker, Dr (!) Bürgers, Dr Daniels, Dr Klein, Dr Jacobi, Otto (a chemist well known in German scientific circles), Röser and Nothjung. The Board of indicting magistrates at Cologne is the nec plus ultra of cowardice. By the way, under the terms of the new disciplinary law, judges are, at least nominally, no longer ‘irremovable’.
Your article for Dana is splendid.
Of course I have only been able to send poor Weydemeyer one more article since you were here. This time my piles have afflicted me more grievously than the French Revolution. I shall see what I can do next week. The state of my posterior does not permit me to go to the Library yet.
Confiscation of the estates begged or stolen by the Orléans! Resignation of Fould! Persigny! Bravo! Ça marche!
It is strange how Army, Navy, colonies, Fortifications and the whole Administration have gone rotten under the rule of this curious regime of an aristocratic clique which the English bourgeois have by tradition lugged along with them at the head of the Executive power ever since 1688. After all that English presumption and liberal outcry inspired by Kossuth, after the cosmopolitan-philanthropic-commercial hymns of peace during the Exhibition, in short, after this period of bourgeois megalomania, it is refreshing when the canaille now come to discover that not something, but everything, is rotten in the State of Denmark. And then, too, these gents take an altogether too complacent view of the struggles on the Continent.
Salut.
Your
K. M.
Send back the two enclosed letters by return, Cluss, at any rate.