Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1878
Source: in The Daily News, June 13, 1878;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.
Sir,
According to a telegram of Reuter’s,
“Herr Bucher, CounciIlor of Legation, is designated for the post of secretary and keeper of the records of the Congress.”
Should this “Herr Bucher” be the same Lothar Bucher who, during his long London exile, shone as a staunch partisan of the late Mr. David Urquhart, whose anti-Russian doctrines he held forth week by week in the Berlin National Gazette; the same Lothar Bucher who, on his return to Berlin, turned so ardent a votary of Ferdinand Lassalle that the latter named him his testamentary executor, bequeathed him an annual revenue, and transferred the copyright of his works to Lothar Bucher ? Soon after Lassalle’s death Lothar Bucher entered the Prussian Foreign Office, was made a “Councillor of Legation,” and became Bismarck’s confidential man-of-all-work.
He had the naïveté to address a letter to myself, inviting me, of course with the sanction of his master, to undertake the money article of the Prussian official Staats-Anzeiger.
The pecuniary terms were left to my discretion, while I was expressly told I should enjoy full liberty of treating the operations and the operators of the money market from my own “scientific” standpoint. Since this odd incident I felt not a little amused at seeing Lothar Bucher’s contributions as a member of the “International Working Men’s Association” daily and yearly chronicled in the columns of the Vorbote, an organ of the international, edited by Johann Philipp Becker at Geneva. If this be not a case of mistaken identity, and if there be anything in the reports that the Russian and German Governments, a propos of the attempts of Hoedel and Nobiling, intend to propose to the Congress international measures against the spread of Socialism, then Herr Bucher is the very man to tell the Congress authoritatively that the organisation, the action, and the doctrines of the German Social-Democratic party have no more to do with these attempts than with the sinking of the Grosser Kurfurst, or with the meeting of the Congress at Berlin; that the panic-mongering arrests throughout Germany and the whirlwind of dust raised by the Press-reptiles serve the exclusive purpose of an electioneering cry for a Reichstag ready to sanction at last the solution, long since elaborated by Prince Bismarck, of the paradox problem how to endow the German Government with all the financial resources of a modern State, while, at the same time, reimposing upon the German people the ancient political regime scattered to pieces by the hurricane of 1848.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
Karl Marx
London, June 12