London, 31 December 1892

Just a line or two before the year ends. Your letters of 18 November and 16 December received—many thanks. Did you get the parcel of books I posted to you in September, containing the Condition of the Working Class, new edition, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, translated by Aveling with an introduction by me? If not I shall send you another parcel by registered mail.

Here, in old Europe, things are proceeding at a somewhat livelier pace than in your 'youthful' country which still can't quite extricate itself from the hobbledehoy stage. It is remarkable, though perfectly natural, that in so young a country, which has never known feudalism and has from the outset grown up upon a bourgeois basis, bourgeois prejudices should be so firmly entrenched even in the working class. Indeed it is precisely his opposition to a mother country still garbed in feudalism that leads the American working man to suppose the traditional bourgeois economic system he has inherited to be by its nature something immutably superior and progressive, a non plus ultra. Just as in New England, where puritanism, precisely because it is the raison d'être of the whole colony, has become a traditional heirloom and all but indistinguishable from local patriotism. However much the Americans may twist and turn, they cannot simply discount, as if it were a bill, what is beyond doubt a tremendous future, but will have to wait until it falls due; and precisely because that future is so great, their present must be largely taken up with preparations for it, a task which, as in any young country, is chiefly of a material nature and calls for a degree of conservative thinking, a clinging to traditions connected with the founding of the new nationality. The Anglo-Saxon race—those damned Schleswig-Holsteiners as Marx always called them—is in any case slow in the uptake, a trait its history both in Europe and in America (economic success and, on the whole, peaceful political evolution) has tended to foster. Here momentous events alone can be of any avail and if, in addition to the transfer—now almost complete—of state-owned lands into private hands, industry were to expand under a somewhat less hare-brained tariff policy and foreign markets be conquered, things might also go well for you people. In this country, too, the class struggles were more violent during the period of growth of large-scale industry and petered out precisely at the time of Britain's undisputed industrial domination in the world; similarly in Germany the growth of large-scale industry since 1850 has coincided with the rise of the socialist movement, and in America things are not likely to turn out any differently. It is the revolutionising of all time-honoured conditions by the growth of industry which likewise revolutionises men's minds.

Furthermore, the Americans have long provided the European world with proof of the fact that the bourgeois republic is the republic of capitalist businessmen in which politics is merely a business transaction like any other—something which the ruling bourgeois politicians in France have long known and practiced on the quiet, and whose truth is at last being brought home to the French on a national scale by the Panama scandal.^[60] Not that the constitutional monarchies can preen them selves on their virtue, for each has its own little Panama; England, the building society scandals of which one, 'the Liberator', has conscientiously 'liberated ' vast numbers of small depositors of savings amounting to some £8 million^[104]; Germany, the Baare scandals and Lowe's 'Jewish rifles'^[105] (which prove that the Prussian officer is, now as always, a thief, but in a very, very small way—the one thing that is modest about him); Italy, the Banca Romana, already an approximation of Panama, which has bought some 150 deputies and senators^[106] and concerning which, so I am told, documents are shortly to be published in Switzerland; Schlüter should keep an eye out for anything about the Banca Romana that appears in the press. And in Holy Russia the Russian Prince Meshchersky waxes indignant over the indifference with which the Panama revelations are received in Russia, the only explanation for this being, he says, that Russian virtue has been corrupted by the example of the French, and that 'we ourselves have more than one Panama here at home'.

However, the Panama affair is the beginning of the end of the bourgeois republic and may soon place us in so me very responsible positions. The whole of the opportunist^[87] and the better part of the Radical gang^[86] are compromised up to the hilt; the government is seeking to hush things up but that is no longer possible, for documentary evidence is in the hands of people who wish to overturn those now in power: 1. The Orleans, 2. the former minister Constans, now out of the running because of revelations about his scandalous past, 3. Rochefort and the Boulangists,^[6] 4. Cornelius Herz who, being himself deeply involved in all manner of frauds, has plainly taken refuge in London merely in order to buy his way out by compromising his fellows. All these people have more than enough evidence against this thieving crew, but are holding back, firstly and more generally, so as not to expend all their powder at one go and, secondly, in order to give the government and the courts of law time to become hopelessly compromised. This is all grist to our mill; enough information gradually leaks out not only to keep the pot on the boil and run the dirigeants[leaders] increasingly onto the rocks, but also to allow time for the scandal and the revelations to do their work in the remotest parts of the country before the inevitable dissolution of the Chamber and the general elections which, however, ought not to come too soon.

That things have very nearly got to the point at which our chaps in France will be the only possible rulers of the state is evident. But it mustn't happen too quickly, our people in France being by no means ripe for leadership. As things are now, it is absolutely impossible to say what intermediate stages there will be in the meantime. The old Republican parties are compromised down to the last man, while the Royalists and Clericals, having sold Panama lottery tickets^[100] on a vast scale, have identified themselves with that affair—if that idiot Boulanger hadn't shot himself, he would now be cock of the walk. I should be curious to know whether the old unconscious logic of French history will again assert itself on this occasion. There are going to be a great many surprises. If only during the interval in which the air is being cleared, some general or other doesn't seize power and foment a war; that is the only danger.

In Germany the party's undeviating, irresistible advance proceeds at a steady pace. Everywhere small successes provide proof of progress. If the Army Bill^[76] is adopted more or less as it stands, there'll be a new floodtide of malcontents coming to join our ranks. If the bill is thrown out, there'll be a dissolution, a general election, and we shall get at least fifty seats in the Reichstag which, in a conflict, might often give us the deciding vote. At all events the struggle, while it may, perhaps, also break out in France, can only be fought to a finish in Germany. But it's a good thing that Volume II I [of Capital] is now at last to be completed—not that I can say when that will be. Times are growing unsettled and the wind is rising.

A very Happy New Year from myself and Mrs Kautsky to you and your wife,[Katharina Sorge]

Your
F. Engels

Notes