Marx Engels Correpsondence 1867
Source: Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 42, Letters 1864-68, pp. 352-55;
First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.
Dear Moor,
Hurrah! There was no holding back that exclamation when at last I read in black and white that the 1st volume3 is complete and that you intend taking it to Hamburg at once. So that you shall not be short of the nervus rerum, I am sending you enclosed the halves of seven five-pound-notes, £35 in toto, and will despatch the other halves immediately I receive the usual telegram. Do not let the scrawl from Bücher – it is undoubtedly from him – worry you, it is just Prussian police gossip and the scandal-mongering of men of letters, of the same ilk as that recent stuff about the Polish trip. I enclose a note for you to give to Meissner, so that you can also collect my fee.
There is no longer even a shadow of doubt about the alliance between Bismarck and the Russians. However, the Russians have never yet had to pay so high a price for their Prussian alliance, they have had to sacrifice their whole traditional policy in Germany and, if this time they were to imagine, as is their wont, that it is only ‘for the moment’, they may well be making the very deuce of a blunder. For all the shouting about the Empire, etc., German unity already seems on the point of outgrowing Bismarck and all those Prussians. They will have to press on all the harder in the Orient – the Russians, that is – , the present favourable conjuncture will surely not endure long. But how great does the financial need have to be and how sluggish must the industrial progress be, s'il y'en a, in Russia, if those fellows are still without a railway to Odessa and Bessarabia, 11 years after the Crimean War, when it would now be worth two armies to them! And so I also believe that the storm will break this year, if everything goes well for the Russians.
The Luxemburg affair appears to be taking the same course as with Saarlouis and Landau. Bismarck undoubtedly offered to sell it in 1866, but Louise really does seem to have held back at that time in the hope that he would later get far more as a present. I have positive knowledge that the Prussian Ambassador Bernstorff told the Hanseatic ditto (Geffcken) in London a few days ago that he had received a despatch to the effect that Prussia was not going to give way over the Luxemburg question under any circumstances. This is the same despatch that The Owl refers to as requesting Britain to make representations at The Hague, which are then said to have succeeded in making Holland withdraw from the deal. The point is that in the present situation Bismarck cannot remotely allow the French to annex German territory without making all his achievements appear ridiculous. What is more, that old jackass William’ has gone and pronounced the words ‘not a single German village’ and is personally committed. It is, however, as yet by no means certain that the deal may not still come to fruition after all; the Kölnische Zeitung is screaming quite hysterically that we really cannot start a war over Luxemburg and that we have no right to it at all; Luxemburg, they say, should no longer be counted part of Germany, etc., so they have never behaved quite so despicably.
Bismarck may not be Faust, but he does have his Wagener. The way in which the poor devil translates his Lord and Master into Wagnerese makes you die of laughing. Bismarck recently employed another of his horse-metaphors, and not wanting to be outdone in this either, Wagener ended a speech by trumpeting: Gentlemen, it is time for us to stop riding our hobby-horses and to mount that noble thoroughbred mare GermaniaV Montez Mademoiselle, the Parisians used to say during the Terror.
I hope that your carbuncles are more or less mended now and that the journey will help get rid of them entirely. You must put an end to this nonsense this summer.
Many regards to the LADIES and Lafargue.
Your
F. E.