In the Case of Brentano vs. Marx

Regarding Alleged Falsifications of Quotation

The Story and Documents

Written: in December 1890 - February 1891;

First published: as a pamphlet in: F. Engels, In Sachen Brentano contra Marx wegem angeblicher Zitatsfälschung., Geschichtserzählung und Dokumente, Hamburg, 1891;

Translated: by John Peet;

Transcribed: by director@marx.org.

Ebook by: Eleanor

1. Contents

Preface

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

1. Documents

I. THE INCRIMINATED QUOTATIONS

1. The Inaugural Address (of the First International)

2. Capital, Vol. I

II. BRENTANO AND MARX

3. The Charge

4. Karl Marx replies

5. Retort by Anonymous

6. Marx's second reply

7. The rejoinder of Anonymous

III. SEDLEY TAYLOR AND ELEANOR MARX

8. Attack by S. Taylor

9. Eleanor Marx's reply

10. Sedley Taylor's retort

11. Eleanor Marx's second reply

IV. ENGELS AND BRENTANO

12. From Engels' preface to the fourth German edition of Marx's Capital, Vol. I

13. Brentano's reply

14. From the Appendices to Brentano's reply

15. From the Parliamentary Reports of the London Press or April 17, 1863

16. Gladstone to Brentano

17. Engels' reply to No. 17

2. Preface

In my Preface to the fourth edition of the first volume of Marx's Capital found myself obliged to return to a polemic against Marx, initiated by Anonymous in the Berlin Concordia in 1872, and taken up again by Mr. Sedley Taylor of Cambridge in The Times in 1883. Anonymous, revealed by Mr. Taylor as Mr. Lujo Brentano, had accused Marx of falsifying a quotation. The short report on the affair which I gave in my Preface (it is printed amongst the attached Documents, No.12), certainly was not intended to be pleasant to Mr. Brentano; nothing was more natural than that he should answer me. And this took place in a pamphlet: Meine Polemik mit Karl Marx. Zugleich em Beitrag zur Frage des Fortschritts der Arbeiterkiasse und seiner Ursachen. Von Lujo Brentano, Berlin, Walther & Apolant, 1890.

This pamphlet gives us too much and too little. Too much, because it "also" gives us at length Mr. Brentano's views on "the advance of the working class and its causes". These views have absolutely nothing to do with the point at issue. I remark only this: Mr. Brentano's constantly repeated declaration that labour protection legislation and trade association organisations are fitted to improve the condition of the working class is by no means his own discovery. From the Condition of the Working Class in England and The Poverty of Philosophy to Capital and down to my most recent writings, Marx and I have said this a hundred times, though with very sharp reservations. Firstly, the favourable effects of the resisting trade associations are confined to periods of average and brisk business; in periods of stagnation and crisis they regularly fail; Mr. Brentano's claim that they "are capable of paralysing the fateful effects of the reserve army" is ridiculous boasting. And secondly — ignoring other less important reservations -- neither the protection legislation nor the resistance of the trade associations removes the main thing which needs abolishing: Capitalist relations, which constantly reproduce the contradiction between the Capitalist class and the class of wage labourers. The mass of wage labourers remain condemned to life-long wage labour; the gap between them and the Capitalists becomes ever deeper and wider the more modern large-scale industry takes over all branches of production. But since Mr. Brentano would gladly convert wage-slaves into contented wage-slaves, he must hugely exaggerate the advantageous effects of labour protection, the resistance of trade associations, social piecemeal legislation, etc.; and as we are able to confront these exaggerations with the simple facts -- hence his fury.

The pamphlet in question gives too little, since it gives, of the documents in the polemic, only the items exchanged between Mr. Brentano and Marx, and not those which have appeared since with regard to this question. So in order to place the reader in a position to form an overall judgement, I give, in the appendix: 1. the incriminated passages from the Inaugural Address of the General Council of the International and from Capital; 2. the polemic between Mr. Brentano and Marx; 3. that between Mr. Sedley Taylor and Eleanor Marx; 4. my Preface to the 4th edition of Capital and Mr. Brentano's reply to it; and 5. passages relevant to Gladstone's letters to Mr. Brentano. It goes without saying that I thereby omit all those passages of Brentano's argument which do not touch upon the question of falsification of quotation, but only constitute his "contribution to the advance", etc.

3. I

In No. 10 of the Berlin Concordia, March 7, 1872, there was a fierce anonymous attack upon Marx as the author of the Inaugural Address of the General Council of the International in 1864. In this Address, it was stated, Marx had falsified a quotation from the budget speech made by Gladstone, at that time English Chancellor of the Exchequer, on April 16, 1863.

The passage from the Inaugural Address is printed in the appendix, Documents, No. 1. The article from the Concordia also there, document No. 3. In the latter, the charge is formulated as follows:

"What is the relationship between this speech and the quotation by Marx? Gladstone first makes the point that there has undoubtedly been a colossal increase in the income of the country. This is proved for him by the income tax. But income tax takes notice only of incomes of 150 pounds sterling and over. Persons with lower incomes pay no income tax in England. The fact that Gladstone mentions this so that his yardstick can be properly appreciated is utilited by Marx to have Gladstone say: 'This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property.' Yet this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech. It says quite the opposite. Marx has added the sentence lyingly. both in form and in content!"

This is the charge and, let it be noted, the only charge, that Anonymous, who has now admitted he is called Lujo Brentano, makes against Marx.

No. 10 of the Concordia was sent to Marx from Germany in May 1872. The copy still in my possession today bears the inscription "Organ of the German Manufacturers' Association". Marx, who had never heard of this sheet, assumed the author to be a scribbling manufacturer, and dealt with him accordingly.

Marx demonstrated in his reply in the Volksstaat (Documents, No.4) that the sentence had not only been quoted in the Same way by Professor Beesly in 1870 in The Fortnightly Review, but also before the publication of the Inaugural Address in [H. Roy,] The Theory of the Exchanges, London, 1864; and finally that the report in The Times on April 17, 1863 also contained the sentence, in form and in content, as he had quoted it:

"The augmentation I have described" (namely as "this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power") "is an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property."

If this passage, a passage which is certainly compromising in the mouth of an English Chancellor of the Exchequer, is not to be found in Hansard, this is simply because Mr. Gladstone was clever enough to get rid of it, in accordance with traditional English parliamentary practice.

In any case, proof was given here that the sentence allegedly lyingly added is to be found verbatim in The Times of April 17, 1863 in its report of the speech delivered by Mr. Gladstone the evening before. And The Times was a Gladstonian organ at that time.

And what is the reply now from Mr. "Modesty" Brentano? (Concordia, July 4, 1872, Documents, No. 5.)

With an impertinence he would never have dared under his own name, he repeats the charge that Marx lyingly added the sentence: this charge, he adds, is

"serious, and combined with the convincing evidence provided, absolutely devastating".

The evidence was nothing but the passage in Hansard in which the sentence is missing. It could thus at the most be "devastating" for this selfsame ill-fated sentence, which appeared in The Times and not in Hansard.

But this victorious crowing was only intended to help negotiate this same unpleasant fact that the "lyingly added" sentence had been confirmed as authentic by the Times report. And with the feeling that this evidence for the prosecution was pretty "convincing", and that it would become "absolutely devastating" in time, our anonymous would-be professor now zealously attacks the quotation in Beesly and in The Theory of the Exchanges, causes a big stir, claims that Beesly quoted from the Inaugural Address and Marx from The Theory of the Exchanges, etc. All these are minor points. Even if they are true, they prove nothing on the question as to whether Gladstone spoke the sentence or Marx invented it. But by their very nature they could not be settled with absolute finality, either by Mr. Brentano at that time, or by me today. On the other hand, they serve to divert attention from the main point, namely from the fatal Times report.

Before venturing to deal with this, Anonymous flexes his muscles by using various items of strong language, such as "frivolity bordering upon the criminal", "this lying quotation", etc.; and then he lays in with gusto as follows:

"But here we come, to he sure, to Marx's third line of defence, and this far exceeds, in its impudent mendacity, anything which came before. Marx actually does not shrink from citing The Times of April 17, 1863 as proof of the correctness of his quotation. The Times of April 17, 1863, p.7, page" (should be column) "5, line 17 et seq., reports, however, the speech as follows:

And here follows the Times report, which runs:

"The augmentation I have described" (namely as "this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power") "and the figures of which are founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is entirely confined to classes of property."

And now we can only stare wide-eyed at the "impudent mendacity" of Marx, who still dares to claim that the Times report contained the sentence: This intoxicating augmentation, etc., is entirely confined to classes of property!

The Inaugural Address states:

"THIS INTOXICATING AUGMENTATION OF WEALTH AND POWER IS ENTIRELY CONFINED TO CLASSES OF PROPERTY."

The Times states:

"THE AUGMENTATION THERE DESCRIBED" (which not even Mr. Brentano, anonymous or not, has so far argued is not the "AUGMENTATION" in the phrase "THIS INTOXICATING AUGMENTATION OF WEALTH AND POWER") "AND WHICH IS FOUNDED, I THINK, UPON ACCURATE RETURNS, IS AN AUGMENTATION ENTIRELY CONFINED TO CLASSES OF PROPERTY."

And now that Mr. Brentano has pointed out in The Times, with his own index finger, the sentence which Marx allegedly lyingly added because it was missing in Hansard, and has thus taken upon himself Marx's alleged impudent mendacity, he declares triumphantly that

"both reports" (Times and Hansard) "fully coincide materially. The report in The Times just gives, formally more contracted, what the shorthand report by Hansard gives verbatim. Yet despite the fact that the Times report contains the direct opposite of that notorious passage in the Inaugural Address, and the fact that according to the Times report, too, Mr. Gladstone said he believed this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power not to be confined to classes in easy circumstances Marx has the impudence to write in the Volksstaat of June 1: 'So, on April 16, 1863, Mr. Gladstone declared both in form and in content in the House of Commons, as reported in his own organ, The Times, on April 17, 1863, that this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to the classes possessed of property.'"

Si duo faciunt idem, non est idem. When two do the same, it is not the same.

When Marx has Gladstone say: This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property, this is "lyingly added", a notorious passage", "completely forged". When the Times report has Gladstone say:

"This augmentation I have described as an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property,"

then this is only "formally more contracted" than the Hansard report, in which this sentence is missing, and the "direct opposite of that" (exactly the Same) "notorious passage in the Inaugural Address". And when Marx then quotes the Times report in confirmation of this passage, Mr. Brentano states:

"...and finally he has the impudence to base himself on newspaper reports which directly contradict him".

This really does demand great "impudence". However, Marx has his on his face, and nowhere else. [Play on words: "Stirn" means forehead and impudence.-- MECW Ed.]

With the aid of "impudence" which may easily be distinguished from that of Marx, Anonymous, alias Lujo Brentano, then manages to have Gladstone say that

he "believes this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power not to be confined to classes in easy circumstances".

Actually, according to The Times and Hansard, Gladstone says he would look with pain and apprehension upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if he believed it was confined to the classes in easy circumstances, and he adds, according to The Times, that it is, however, "confined to classes of property".

"Indeed," the righteously indignant Anonymous finally exclaims, "to describe these practices we know only one word, a word with which Marx is very familiar (see Capital, p. 257): they are simply 'nefarious'."

Whose practices, Mr. Lujo Brentano?

4. II

Marx's reply (Der Volksstaat, August 7, 1872, Documents, No. 6) is good-natured enough to deal with all the stir created by Mr. Brentano about Professor Beesly, The Theory of the Exchanges, etc.; we leave this aside as being of secondary importance. In conclusion, however, it produces another two facts which are absolutely decisive for the main issue. The "lyingly added" passage is to be found, besides in the Times report, in the reports of two other London morning papers of April 17, 1863. According to The Morning Star, Gladstone stated:

"This augmentation" -- which had just been described as an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power -- "is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property."

According to The Morning Advertiser:

"The augmentation stated" -- an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power -- "is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property."

For any other opponent, these proofs would be "absolutely devastating". Not, however, for the anonymous Brentano. His reply (Concordia, August 22, 1872, Documents, No. 7), which betrays undiminished impudence, was never seen by Marx, since numbers of Concordia later than that dated July 11 were not sent to him. I myself first read this reply in Brentano's reprint (Meine Polemik, etc., 1890), and must therefore take note of it here, for better or for worse.

"The dogged mendacity with which he" (Marx) "clings to the distorted quotation ... is astonishing even for someone for whom no means are too base for his subversive plans."

The quotation remains "forged", and the Times report "shows the exact opposite, since The Times and Hansard fully coincide". The confidence of this declaration is, however, simply child's play compared to the "impudence" with which Mr. Brentano suddenly gives us the following information:

"Marx's second method of obscuring the Times report was simply to suppress, in his German translation, the relative clause which showed that Gladstone had only said that the augmentation of wealth, which was shown by the income tax returns, was confined to the classes of property, since the working classes were not subject to income tax, and that thus nothing about the increase in the prosperity of the working classes could be learned from the income tax returns; not, however, that the working classes in reality had been excluded from the extraordinary augmentation of national wealth."

Thus when The Times says that the oft-mentioned augmentation is confined to the classes of property, then it says the opposite of the "lyingly added" sentence, which says the same. As regards the "simply suppressed relative clause", we shall not allow Mr. Brentano to get away with that, if he will bear with us for a moment. And now he has happily survived the first great leap, it is easier for him to assert that black is white, and white black. Now that he has managed to deal with The Times, The Morning Star and The Morning Advertiser will give him little trouble.

"For these papers, even as he" (Marx) "quotes them, speak for us. After Gladstone has said, according to both papers, that he does not believe" (which, as we know, Mr. Brentano claims) "this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is confined to the classes which find themselves in pleasant circumstances, he continued: 'This great increase of wealth takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation which I have described is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property.' The context and the use of the expression 'take cognizance' show clearly that this increase and the augmentation of the increase cited, and the citing," (sic!) "are intended to indicate those discernible in the income tax returns."

The Jesuit who originated the saying Si duo faciunt idem, non est idem was a bungler compared to the anonymous Brentano. When The Times, The Morning Star and The Morning Advertiser declare unanimously that the sentence which Brentano claims Marx had "lyingly added" was actually uttered by Gladstone, then these papers speak unanimously "for" Mr. Brentano. And when Marx quotes this sentence verbatim, this is a "lying quotation", "impudent mendacity , complete forgery", "a lie", etc. And if Marx cannot appreciate this, that passes the understanding of our Anonymous, alias Lujo Brentano, and he finds it "simply nefarious".

But let us deal with the alleged "lying addition" once and for all by quoting the reports on our passage in all London morning papers on April 17, 1863.

We have already had The Times, The Morning Star and The Morning Advertiser.

Daily Telegraph:

"I may say for one, that I should look almost with apprehension and alarm on this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was confined to the masses who are in easy circumstances. This question to wealth takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation stated is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property."

Morning Herald:

"I may say that I for one would look with fear and apprehension at this intoxicating increase of wealth if I were of opinion that it is confined to the classes in easy circumstances. This great increase of wealth which I have described, and which is founded on accurate returns is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital, and takes no account of the poorer classes."

Morning Post:

"I may say, I for One, would look with fear and apprehension when I consider this great increase of wealth if I believed that its benefits were confined to the classes in easy circumstances. This augmentation of wealth which I have described, and which is founded on accurate returns is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital, and takes no account of the augmentation of wealth of the poorer classes."

Daily News:

"I may say that I for one would look with fear and apprehension when I consider this great increase of wealth if I believed that its benefits were confined to the classes in easy circumstances. This augmentation of wealth which I have described, and which is founded upon accurate returns, is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital, and takes no account of the augmentation of wealth of the poorer classes."

Standard:

"I may say that I for one would look with fear and apprehension at this intoxicating increase of wealth if I were of the opinion that it was confined to the classes in easy circumstances. This great increase of wealth which I have described, and which is founded on the accurate returns is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital, and takes no account of the poorer classes."

The eight newspapers cited here were, as far as I know, the only morning papers published in London at that time. Their testimony is "convincing". Four of them -- The Times, The Morning Star, The Morning Advertiser, Daily Telegraph -- give the sentence in exactly the form which Marx had "lyingly added". The augmentation described earlier as an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power "is entirely confined to classes of property". The four others -- Morning Herald, Morning Post, Daily News and Standard -- give it in an "only formally more contracted" version, by which it is further reinforced; this augmentation "is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital".

The eight newspapers cited all have their separate complete staff of parliamentary reporters. They are thus the same number of witnesses, fully independent of one another. In addition they are in their totality impartial, since they adhere to the most diverse party tendencies. And both of the two versions of the irrepressible sentence are vouched for by Tories and Whigs and radicals. According to four of them, Gladstone said: entirely confined to classes of property. According to four others he said: entirely confined to the augmentation of Capital. Eight irreproachable witnesses thus testify that Gladstone really uttered the sentence. The only question is whether this was in the milder version used by Marx, or in the stronger version given in four of the reports.

Against them all, in isolated grandeur stands -- Hansard. But Hansard is not irreproachable like the morning papers. Hansard's reports are subject to censorship, the censorship of the speakers themselves. And precisely for this reason "it is the custom to quote according to Hansard.

Eight non-suspect witnesses against one suspect witness! But what does that worry our victory-confident Anonymous? Precisely because the reports of the eight morning papers put "that notorious passage" in Gladstone's mouth, precisely because of this, they "speak for" our Anonymous, precisely by this they prove even more that Marx "lyingly added" it.

Indeed, nothing actually exceeds the "impudence" of the anonymous Brentano.

5. III

In reality, however, the ostentatious impudence we had to admire in Mr. Brentano, is nothing but a tactical manoeuvre. He has discovered that the attack on the "lyingly added" sentence has failed, and that he must seek a defensive position. He has found it; all that has to be done now is to retreat to this new position.

Already in his first reply to Marx (Documents, No. 5) Mr. Brentano hints at his intention, though bashfully as yet. The fatal Times report compels him to do so. This report, it is true, contains the "notorious", the "lyingly added" passage, but that is actually beside the point. For since it "fully coincides materially" with Hansard, it says "the direct opposite of that notorious passage", although it contains it word for word. Thus it is no longer a question of the wording of the "notorious passage", but of its meaning. It is no longer a question of denying the passage's existence, but of claiming that it means the opposite of what it says.

And Marx having declared in his second reply that lack of time forces him to end, once and for all, his pleasurable exchange of opinions with his anonymous opponent, the latter can venture to deal with even greater confidence with this subject, which is not exactly proper at that. This he does in his rejoinder, reproduced here as No. 7 of the documents.

Here he claims that Marx attempts to obscure the Times report, which materially fully coincides with Hansard, and this is in three ways. Firstly by an incorrect translation of CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES. I leave aside this point as absolutely irrelevant. It is generally known that Marx had a command of the English language quite different from that of Mr. Brentano. But exactly what Mr. Gladstone thought when he used this expression-and whether he thought anything-it is quite impossible to say today, 27 years later, even for himself.

The second point is that Marx "simply suppressed" a certain "relative clause" in the Times report. The passage in question is previously cited at length in section II, p. 7. By suppressing this relative clause, Marx is supposed to have suppressed for his readers the fact that the augmentation of wealth, as shown by the income tax returns, is confined to classes which possess property, since the labouring classes do not fall under the income tax, and thus nothing may be learned from the returns about the increase in prosperity amongst the workers; this does not mean, however, that in reality the labouring classes remain excluded from the extraordinary augmentation of national wealth.

The sentence in the Times report runs, in Mr. Brentano's own translation:

"The augmentation I have described, and the figures of which are based, I think, upon accurate returns, is entirely confined to classes of property."

The relative clause which Marx so maliciously "suppressed" consists of the words: "and the figures of which are based, I think, upon accurate returns". By the persistent, since twice repeated, suppression of these highly important words, so the story goes, Marx wished to conceal from his readers that the said augmentation was an augmentation solely of the income subject to income tax, in other words the income of the "classes which possess property".

Does his moral indignation at the fact that he had run aground with "mendacity" make Mr. Brentano blind? Or does he think that he can make all sorts of allegations, since Marx will no longer reply in any case? The fact is that the incriminated sentence begins, according to Marx, both in the Inaugural Address and in Capitol, with the words: "From 1842 to 1852 THE TAXABLE INCOME of the country increased by 6 per cent... In the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has ..." etc.

Does Mr. Brentano know another "taxable income" in England apart from that subject to income tax? And has the highly important "relative clause" anything at all to add to this clear declaration that only income subject to income tax is under discussion? Or does he believe, as it almost appears, that people "forge" Gladstone's budget speeches, make "lying additions" or "suppress" something in them if they quote them without, à la Brentano, also providing the reader with an essay on English income tax in which they "falsify" income tax into the bargain, as Marx proved (Documents, No. 6),b and as Mr. Brentano was forced to admit (Documents, No. 7). And when the "lyingly added" sentence simply says that the augmentation just mentioned by Mr. Gladstone was confined to classes of property, does it not say essentially the same, since only classes of property pay income tax? But of course, whilst Mr. Brentano creates a deafening hullabaloo at the front door about this sentence as a Marxian falsification and insolent mendacity, he himself allows it to slip in quietly through the back door.

Mr. Brentano knew very well that Marx quoted Mr. Gladstone as speaking about "taxable income" and no other. For in his first attack (Documents, No.3), he quotes the passage from the Inaugural Address, and even translated TAXABLE as "liable to tax"

If he now "suppresses" this in his rejoinder, and if from now on until his pamphlet of 1890 he protests again and again that Marx concealed, intentionally and maliciously, the fact that Gladstone was speaking here solely of those incomes liable to income tax -- should we now sling his own expressions back at him: "lying", "forgery", "impudent mendacity", "simply nefarious"?

To continue with the text:

"Thirdly and finally, Marx attempted to conceal the agreement between the Times report and the Hansard report by failing to quote those sentences in which, according to The Times too, Gladstone directly and explicitly testified to the elevation of the British working class."

In his second reply to the anonymous Brentano, Marx had to prove that he had not "lyingly added" the "notorious" sentence, and in addition had to reject the insolent claim made by Anonymous: in relation to this point, the only point in question, the Times report and the Hansard report "fully coincided materially", although the former included the sentence in question verbatim, and the latter excluded it verbatim. For this, the only point at issue, it was absolutely irrelevant what Mr. Gladstone had to say about the elevation of the British working class.

On the other hand the Inaugural Address -- and this is the document which Brentano accuses of falsifying a quotation -- states explicitly on p. 4, only a few lines before the "notorious" sentence, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Gladstone), during the millennium of free trade, told the House of Commons:

"The average condition of the British labourer has improved in a degree we know to be extraordinary and unexampled in the history of any country or any age."

And these are precisely the words which, according to Brentano, Marx maliciously suppressed.

In the whole polemic, from his first retort to Marx in 1872 (Documents, No.5) down to his introduction and appendix to Meine Polemik, etc., 1890, Mr. Brentano suppresses, with a sleight of hand which we must on no account describe as "insolent mendacity", the fact that Marx directly quoted in the Inaugural Address these Gladstonian declarations about the unparalleled improvement in the situation of the workers. And in this rejoinder, which, as already mentioned, remained unknown to Marx up to his death, and to me until the publication of the pamphlet Meine Polemik, etc., in 1890, in which the accusation about the lyingly added sentence was only apparently maintained, though in reality dropped, and the lyingly added sentence not only shamefacedly admitted as genuine Gladstonian property, but also as "speaking for us", i.e. for Brentano -- in this rejoinder a retreat is beaten to the new line of defence: Marx has distorted and twisted Gladstone's speech; Marx has Gladstone say that, it goes, the riches of the rich have grown enormously, but that the poor, the working population, have at the most become less poor. But in fact Gladstone said, in plain words, that the condition of the workers had improved to an unexampled degree.

This second line of defence was pierced by the irresistible fact that precisely in the incriminated document, in the Inaugural Address, these same Gladstonian words were quoted explicitly. And Mr. Brentano knew this. "But what does it matter? The readers" of the Concordia "cannot check up on him!"

Incidentally, regarding what Gladstone really said, on this we shall have a few short words to say in a little while.

In conclusion, Mr. Brentano, in the security, first of his anonymity, and second of Marx's declaration that he has no wish to bother with him further, indulges in the following private jollity:

"When Mr. Marx finally ends his article by breaking into abuse, we can assure him that his opponent could desire nothing more than the confession of his weakness which lies herein. Abuse is the weapon of those whose other means of defence have run out."

The reader can check for himself the extent to which Marx "breaks into abuse" in his rejoinder. As far as Mr. Brentano is concerned, we have already presented some choice bouquets from his attestations of politeness. The "lies", "impudent mendacity", "lying quotation", "simply nefarious", etc., heaped upon Marx's head by all means constitute an edifying "confession of weakness", and an unmistakeable sign that Mr. Brentano's "other means of defence have run out".

6. IV

Here ends the first act of our song and dance. Mr. Brentano, mysterious though not yet a privy councillor, [Play on words: "geheimnisvoll" -- mysterious, "Geheimrat" -- privy councillor.-- Trans] had achieved what he could scarcely have hoped to achieve. Admittedly, things had gone badly enough for him regarding the sentence allegedly "lyingly added"; and in fact he had dropped this original charge. But he had sought out a new line of defence, and on this line -- he had had the last word, and with that you can, in the world of German professordom, claim you have stood your ground. And with this he could brag, at least amongst his own, that he had victoriously repelled Marx's onslaught, and slain Marx himself in the literary world. The luckless Marx, however, never heard a dying word about his slaughter in the Concordia; on the contrary, he had the "impudence" to live on for another eleven years, eleven years of mounting success for him, eleven years of uninterrupted growth in the numerical strength of his supporters in all countries, eleven years of constantly growing recognition of his merits.

Mr. Brentano and consorts wisely refrained from freeing the blinded Marx of his self-deception, or making it clear to him that he had actually been dead for a long time. But after he really did die in 1883, they could no longer contain themselves, their fingers itched too much. And now Mr. Sedley Taylor appeared on the scene, with a letter to The Times (Documents, No. 8).

He provoked things himself, if he or his friend Brentano, as it almost appears, had not actually concocted it with M. Émile de Laveleye [see É. de Laveleye, "To the Editor of The Times, Liège, November 16". The Times, No. 30987, November 26, 1883. -- MECW Ed]. In that stilted style which betrays a certain recognition of his dubious cause, he states that it appears to him

"extremely singular that it was reserved for Professor Brentano to expose, eight years later, the mala fides" of Marx.

And then begin the vainglorious phrases about the masterly conduct of the attack by the godlike Brentano, and the speedily ensuring deadly shifts of the notorious Marx, etc. What things were like in reality our readers have already seen. All that fell into deadly shifts was only Brentano's claim about the lying addition of the sentence in question.

And finally in conclusion:

"On Brentano's showing, by a detailed comparison of texts, that the reports of The Times and of "Hansard" agreed in utterly excluding the meaning which craftily isolated quotation had put upon Mr. Gladstone's words, Marx withdrew from further controversy under the plea of want of time!"

The "detailed comparison of texts" is simply farcical. Anonymous Brentano quotes only Hansard. Marx supplies him with the Times report, which includes verbatim the controversial sentence missing in Hansard. Mr. Brentano now also quoted the Times report, and this three lines further than Marx quoted it. These three lines are supposed to show that The Times and Hansard fully agree, and thus that the sentence allegedly "lyingly added" by Marx is not in the Times report, although it stands there word for word; or at the very least, if it should stand there, that it then means the opposite of what it says in plain words. Mr. Taylor calls this daredevil operation a "detailed comparison of texts".

Further. It is simply not true that Marx then withdrew under the plea of want of time. And Mr. Sedley Taylor knew this, or it was his business to know it. We have seen that before this Marx delivered proof to the anonymous godlike Brentano that the reports in The Morning Star and The Morning Advertiser also contained the "lyingly added" sentence. Only after this did he declare that he could waste no more time on Anonymous.

The further polemic between Mr. Sedley Taylor and Eleanor Marx (Documents, Nos 9, 10 and 11) showed in the first place that he did not try for a moment to maintain the original charge about the lying addition of a sentence. He went so far as to claim that this was "of very subordinate importance." Once again the direct disavowal of a fact which he knew, or which it was his business to know.

In any case we take note of his admission that this charge does not hold water, and congratulate his friend Brentano on this.

So what is the charge now? Simply that of Mr. Brentano's second line of defence that Marx had wished to distort the sense of Gladstone's speech -- a new charge of which, as we have noted, Marx never knew anything. In any case, this brings us to a completely different field. What was concerned to begin with was a definite fact: did Marx lyingly add this sentence or not? It is now no longer denied that Marx victoriously rebuffed this charge. The new charge of distorted quotation, however, leads us into the field of subjective opinions, which necessarily vary. De gustibus non est disputandum. [There can be no argument about taste. -- MECW Ed.] One person may regard as unimportant -- intrinsically or for the purpose of quotation -- something which another person declares to be important and decisive. The conservative will [never] quote acceptably for the liberal, the liberal never for the conservative, the socialist never for one of them or both of them. The party man whose own comrade is quoted against him by an opponent regularly discovers that the essential passage, the passage determining the real sense, has been omitted in quotation. This is such an everyday occurrence, something permitting so many individual viewpoints, that nobody attaches the slightest significance to such charges. Had Mr. Brentano utilised his anonimity to level this charge, and this charge alone, against Marx, then Marx would scarcely have regarded it as worth the trouble of a single word in reply.

In order to accomplish this new twist with that elegance peculiar to him alone, Mr. Sedley Taylor finds it necessary to repudiate thrice his friend and comrade Brentano. He repudiates him first when he drops his originally sole charge of "lying addition", and even denies its existence as original and sole. He repudiates him further when he summarily discards the infallible Hansard, to quote exclusively from which is the "custom" of the ethical Brentano, [Play on words: "Sitte" -- custom, "sittlich" -- ethical.-- MECW Ed.] and uses instead the Times report, which the selfsame Brentano calls "necessarily bungling". Thirdly, he repudiates him, and his own first letter to The Times into the bargain, by seeking the "quotation in dispute" no longer in the Inaugural Address but in Capital And this for the simple reason that he had never laid his hand upon the Inaugural Address, to which he "had the hardihood" to refer in his letter to The Times!

Shortly after his controversy with Eleanor Marx he vainly sought this Address in the British Museum, and was introduced there to his opponent, whom he asked whether she could not obtain a copy for him. Whereupon, I sought out a copy amongst my papers, and Eleanor sent it to him. The "detailed comparison of texts" which this enabled him to make apparently convinced him that silence was the best reply.

And in fact it would be superfluous to add a single word to Eleanor Marx's retort (Documents, No. 11)

7. V

Third act. My Preface to the fourth edition of the first volume of Marx's Capital, reprinted as far as necessary in Documents, No. 12, explains why I was forced to return to the bygone polemics of Messrs Brentano and Sedley Taylor. This Preface forced Mr. Brentano to make a reply: this was the pamphlet Meine Polemik mit Karl Marx usw. by Lujo Brentano, Berlin, 1890. Here he has reprinted his anonymous and now finally legitimated Concordia articles, and Marx's answers in the Volksstaat, accompanied by an introduction and two appendices, with which, for better or worse, we are obliged to deal.

Above all we note that here too there is no longer any mention of the "lyingly added" sentence. The sentence from the Inaugural Address is quoted right on the first page, and it is then claimed that Gladstone had "stated in direct opposition to Karl Marx's claim" that these figures referred only to those paying income tax (which Marx had Gladstone say too, since he explicitly limits these figures to taxable income) but that the condition of the working class had at the same time improved in unexampled fashion (which Marx also has Gladstone say, only nine lines before the challenged quotation). I would request the reader to compare for himself the Inaugural Address (Documents, No. 1) with Mr. Brentano's claim (Documents, No. 13) in order to see how Mr. Brentano either "lyingly adds", or fabricates in another manner, a contradiction where there is none at all. But since the charge about the lyingly added sentence has broken down ignominiously, Mr. Brentano, contrary to his better knowledge, must attempt to take in his readers by telling them Marx tried to suppress the fact that Gladstone had spoken here only of "taxable income", or the income of classes which possess property. And here Mr. Brentano does not even notice that his first accusation is thus turned into the opposite, in that the second is a slap in the face of the first.

Having happily accomplished this "forgery", he is moved to draw the attention of the Concordia to the "forgery" allegedly committed by Marx, and the Concordia then asks him to send it an article against Marx. What now follows is too delicious not to be given verbatim:

"The article was not signed by me; this was done, on the one hand, at the request of the editors in the interests of the reputation of their paper, and, on the other hand, I had all the less objection, since following earlier literary controversies pursued by Marx it was to be expected that this time too he would heap personal insults on his adversary, and for this reason it could only be amusing to leave him in the dark as to the identity of his adversary."

So the editors of the Concordia wished "in the interests of the reputation of their paper" that Mr. Brentano should keep his name quiet! What a reputation this implies for Mr. Brentano amongst his colleagues in his own party. We can well believe that this actually happened to him, but that he himself shouts it from the rooftops is a really pyramidal achievement on his part. However, this is something which he has to settle with himself and with the editors of the Concordia.

Since "it was to be expected that Marx would heap personal insults on his adversary", it could naturally "only be amusing to leave him in the dark as to the identity of his adversary". It was hitherto a mystery as to how you can heap personal insults upon a person you do not know. You can only get personal if you know something of the person in question. But Mr. Brentano, made anonymous in the interests of the paper's reputation, relieved his adversary of this trouble. He himself waded in with "insults", first with the "lyingly added" printed in bold type, and then with "impudent mendacity", "simply nefarious", etc. Mr. Brentano, the non-anonymous, obviously made a slip of the pen here. Mr. Brentano "on the other hand, had all the less objection" to the anonymity imposed upon himself, not so that the well-known Marx could "heap personal insults" upon the unknown Brentano, but so that the concealed Brentano could do this to the well-known Marx.

And this is supposed to "be amusing"! That's what actually transpired, but not because Mr. Brentano wanted it. Marx, as later his daughter, and now myself, have all tried to see the amusing aspect of this polemic. Such success as we have had, be it great or small, has been at the expense of Mr. Brentano. His articles have been anything but "amusing". The only contributions to amusement are the rapier-thrusts aimed by Marx at the shady side of his "left-in-the-dark person", which the man at the receiving end now wishes to laugh off belatedly as the "loutishness of his scurrilous polemics". The Junkers, the priests, the lawyers and other right and proper opponents of the incisive polemics of Voltaire, Beaumarchais and Paul Louis Courier objected to the "loutishness of their scurrilous polemics", which has not prevented these examples of "loutishness" from being regarded as models and masterpieces today. And we have had so much pleasure from these and similar "scurrilous polemics" that a hundred Brentanos should not succeed in dragging us down to the level of German university polemics, where there is nothing but the impotent rage of green envy, and the most desolate boredom.

However, Mr. Brentano once again regards his readers as so duped that he can lay it on thick again with a brazen face:

"When it was shown that The Times too ... carried this" (Gladstone's) "speech in a sense according with the shorthand report, he" (Marx) "acted, as the editors of the Concordia wrote, like the cuttlefish, which dims the water with a dark fluid, in order to make pursuit by its enemy more difficult, i.e. he tried as hard as he could to hide the subject of controversy by clinging to completely inconsequential secondary matters."

If the Times report, which contains the "lyingly added" sentence word for word, accords in sense with the "shorthand" report -- should be with Hansard -- which suppresses it word for word, and if Mr. Brentano once again boasts that he had demonstrated this, this can mean nothing other than the charge concerning the "lyingly added" sentence has been completely dropped -- though shamefacedly and quietly -- and Mr. Brentano, forced from the offensive onto the defensive, is retreating to his second line of defence. We simply note this; we believe that in sections III and IV we have thoroughly broken through the centre of this second line, and turned both flanks.

But then the genuine university polemicist appears. When Brentano, emboldened by the scent of victory, has thus driven his enemy into the corner, the foe acts like the cuttlefish, darkening the water and hiding the subject of controversy by focusing attention on completely inconsequential secondary matters.

The Jesuits say: Si fecisti, nega. If you have perpetrated something, deny it. The German university polemicist goes further and Says: If you have perpetrated a shady lawyer's trick, then lay it at your opponent's door. Scarcely has Marx quoted The Theory of the Exchanges and Professor Beesly, and this simply because they had quoted the disputed passage like he had, than Brentano the cuttlefish "clings" to them with all the suckers of his ten feet, and spreads such a torrent of his "dark fluid" all around that you must look hard and grasp firmly if you do not wish to lose from eye and hand the real "subject of controversy", namely the allegedly "lyingly added" sentence. In his rejoinder, exactly the same method. First he starts another squabble with Marx about the meaning of the expression CLASSES IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES, a squabble which under the best of circumstances could produce nothing but that very "obscuration" which Mr. Brentano desires. And then dark fluid is again squirted in the matter of that renowned relative clause which Marx had maliciously suppressed, and which, as we have shown, could perfectly well be omitted, since the fact to which it indirectly alluded had already been stated quite clearly in an earlier sentence of the speech which had been quoted by Marx. And thirdly, our cuttlefish has enough dark sauce left over to obscure once again the subject of controversy, by claiming that Marx has again suppressed some sentences from The Times -- sentences which had absolutely nothing to do with the single point at issue between them at that time, the allegedly lyingly added sentence.

And the same waste of sepia in the present self-apologia. First, naturally, The Theory of the Exchanges must be the whipping boy.

Then, all of a sudden, we are confronted with the Lassallean "iron law of wages" with which, as everyone knows, Marx was as little connected as Mr. Brentano with the invention of gunpowder; Mr. Brentano must know that in the first volume of Capital Marx specifically denied all and every responsibility for any conclusions drawn by Lassalle, and that in the same book Marx describes the law of wages as a function of differing variables and very elastic, thus anything but iron. But when the ink-squirting has started there is no stopping it: the Halle congress, Liebknecht and Bebel, Gladstone's budget speech of 1843, the English trade unions, all manner of far-fetched things are resorted to so as, faced with an opponent who has gone over to the offensive, to cover by self-apologia the defensive line of Mr. Brentano and his lofty philanthropic principles, treated so scornfully by the wicked socialists. One gets the impression that a round dozen cuttlefish were helping him do the "hushing up" here.

And all of this because Mr. Brentano himself knows that he has hopelessly run aground with his claim about the "lyingly added" sentence, and has not got the courage to withdraw this claim openly and honourably. To use his own words:

"Had he" Brentano "simply admitted that he had been misled by this book", Hansard, "...one might have been surprised that he had relied upon such a source" as absolutely reliable "but the mistake would at least have been rectified. But for him there was no question of this."

Instead the ink was squirted in gallons for obscuring purposes, and if I have to be so discursive here, this is only because I must first dispose of all these far-fetched marginal questions, and disperse the obscuring ink in order to keep eye and hand on the real subject of the controversy.

Meanwhile Mr. Brentano has another piece of information for us in petto [in store], which in fact "could only be amusing". He has, in fact, been so lamentably treated that he can find no peace and quiet until he has moaned to us about all his misfortune. First the Concordia suppresses his name in the interests of the reputation of the paper. Mr. Brentano is magnanimous enough to consent to this sacrifice in the interests of the good cause. Then Marx unleashes upon him the loutishness of his scurrilous polemics. This too he swallows. Only he wished to reply to this "with the verbatim publication of the entire polemic". But sadly

"editors often have their own judgement; the specialist journal which I regarded as suitable above all others refused to publish, on the grounds that the dispute lacked general interest".

Thus do the noble suffer in this sinful world; their best intentions founder on the baseness or indifference of man. And to compensate this unappreciated honest fellow for his undeserved misfortune, and since some time will probably pass before he rounds up an editor who has not "often his own judgement", we herewith present him the "the verbatim publication of the entire polemic".

8. VI

In addition to the introductory self-apologia, Mr. Brentano's little pamphlet contains two appendices. The first contains extracts from The Theory of the Exchanges, intended to prove that this book was one of the main sources from which Marx concocted his Capital I shall not go into detail about this repeated waste of sepia. I only have to deal with the old charge from the Concordia. His whole life long Marx could not and would not please Mr. Brentano. Mr. Brentano thus certainly has a whole bottomless sack of complaints against Marx, and I would be an idiot to let myself in for this. There would be no end to pleasing him.

But it is naïve that here, at the end of the quotations, "the reproduction of the teal budget speech" is demanded from Marx. So that is what Mr. Brentano understands by correct quotation. However, if the whole actual speech is always to be reproduced, then no speech has ever been quoted without "forgery".

In the second appendix Mr. Brentano has a go at me. In the fourth edition of Capital, volume one, I drew attention to The Morning Star in connection with the allegedly false quotation. Mr. Brentano utilises this to once again obscure completely, with spurts of sepia, the original point at issue, the passage in the Inaugural Address, and instead of this to hit out at the passage in Capital already quoted by Mr. S. Taylor. In order to prove that my source of reference was false, and that Marx could only have taken the "forged quotation" from The Theory of the Exchanges, Mr. Brentano prints in parallel columns the reports of The Times and The Morning Star and the quotation according to Capital This second appendix is printed here as document No. 14.

Mr. Brentano has The Morning Star begin its report with the words "I MUST SAY FOR ONE" etc. He thus claims that the preceding sentences on the growth of taxable income from 1842 to 1852, and from 1853 to 1861 are missing in The Morning Star; from which it naturally follows that Marx did not use The Morning Star but The Theory of the Exchanges.

"The readers" of his pamphlet "with whom he is concerned, cannot check up on him!" But other people can, and they discover that this passage is certainly to be found in The Morning Star. We reprint it here, next to the passage from Capital in English and German for the edification of Mr. Brentano and his readers.

"The Morning Star", April 17, 1863 "Capital", Vol. I, 1st ed., p. 639; 2nd ed., p. 678; 3rd., p. 671; 4th ed., p. 617, Note 103

"In ten years, from 1842 to 1852 the "From 1842 to 1852 the taxable taxable income of the country increased income of the country increased by by 6 per cent, as nearly as I can make 6 per cent... out -- a very considerable increase in ten years. But in eight years from 1853 to 1861 the income of the country ... In the 8 years from 1858 to 1861 ... again increased from the basis taken in it had increased from the basis taken in 1853 by 20 per cent. The fact is so 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incred- astonishing as to be almost incredible."

In German translation:

The absence of this sentence in his quotation from The Morning Star is Mr. Brentano's main trump card in his claim that Marx quoted from The Theory of the Exchanges and not from The Morning Star. He confronts the claim that the quotation was taken from The Morning Star with the incriminating gap in the parallel column. And now the sentence is nevertheless to be found in The Morning Star, in fact exactly as in Marx, and the incriminating gap is Mr. Brentano's own invention. If that is not "suppression" and "forgery", into the bargain, then these words lack any sense.

But if Mr. Brentano "forges" at the beginning of the quotation, and if he now very carefully refrains from saying that Marx "lyingly added" a sentence in the middle of the same quotation, this in no way prevents him from insisting repeatedly that Marx suppressed the end of the quotation.

In Capital the quotation breaks off with the passage:

"Whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say."

Now in the reports in The Times and The Morning Star the sentence does not end here; separated only by a comma, there follow the words:

"but the average condition of the British labourer, we have the happiness to know to be extraordinary" (in The Times: has improved during the last 20 years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary) "and which we may almost pronounce to be unexampled in the history of any country and of any age".

Thus Marx breaks off here in mid-sentence, "has Gladstone stop in mid-sentence", "making this sentence quite meaningless". And already in his rejoinder (Documents, No.7) Mr. Brentano calls this an "absolutely senseless version".

Gladstone's sentence: "Whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say" is a quite definite statement, complete in itself. If it makes sense, it makes sense when taken in isolation. If it makes no sense, no addition however long, tacked on behind a "yet", can give it sense. If the sentence in Marx's quotation is "completely senseless", then this is not due to Marx who quoted it, but to Mr. Gladstone who uttered it.

To probe more deeply this important case, let us now turn to the only source which, according to Mr. Brentano, it is the "custom" to quote, let us turn to Hansard, pure of all original sin. According to Mr. Brentano's own translation, it says:

"I will not presume to determine whether the wide interval which separates the extremes of wealth and poverty is less or more wide than it has been in former times" -- full stop.

And only after this full stop does the new sentence begin:

"But if we look to the average condition of the British labourer", etc.

Thus if Marx likewise sets a full stop here, he does just as the virtuous Hansard does; and if Mr. Brentano makes this full stop a new crime on the part of Marx, and claims that Marx has Gladstone stop in the mid-sentence, then he has relied upon the "necessarily bungling newspaper reports", and he can only blame himself for the consequences. Thus the argument collapses that Marx has made the sentence completely senseless through his full stop; this comes not from him but from Mr. Gladstone, and let Mr. Brentano now correspond with him about the sense or nonsense of the sentence; we have nothing more to do with the matter.

For Mr. Brentano is anyway in correspondence with Mr. Gladstone. What he has written to the latter we do not learn, of course, and we only learn very little of what Mr. Gladstone has written to him. In any case, Mr. Brentano has published from Gladstone's letters two meagre little sentences (Documents, No.16) and in my reply (Documents, No. 17) I showed that "this arbitrary mosaic of sentences torn from their context" proves nothing at all in Mr. Brentano's favour whilst the fact that he indulges in this sort of ragged publication, instead of publishing the whole correspondence, speaks volumes against him.

But let us assume for a moment that these two little sentences only permitted the interpretation most favourable to Mr. Brentano. What then?

"You are completely correct, and Marx completely incorrect." "I undertook no changes of any sort." These are the alleged words -- for Mr. Gladstone does not usually write in German, as far as I know -- of the former minister.

Does this mean: I did not utter the "notorious" sentence, and that Marx "lyingly added" it? Certainly not. The eight London morning papers of April 17, 1863 would unanimously give the lie to such a claim. They prove beyond all doubt that this sentence was spoken. If Mr. Gladstone made no changes in the Hansard report -- although I am twelve years younger than him, I would not like to rely so implicitly on my memory in such trivialities which occurred 27 years ago -- then the omission of the sentence in Hansard says nothing in Mr. Brentano's favour, and a great deal against Hansard.

Aside from this one point about the "lyingly added" sentence, Mr. Gladstone's opinion is completely inconsequential here. For as soon as we disregard this point, we find ourselves exclusively in the field of inconsequential opinions, in which after years of strife each sticks to his guns. If Mr. Gladstone, should he happen to be quoted, prefers the quotation methods of Mr. Brentano, an admiring supporter, to those of Marx, a sharply critical opponent, then this is quite obvious, and his indisputable right. For us, however, and for the question as to whether Marx quoted in good or in bad faith, his opinion is not even worth as much as that of any old uninvolved third person. For here Mr. Gladstone is no longer a witness but an interested party.

9. VII

In conclusion, let us go briefly into the question of what Mr. Gladstone said in that -- thanks to Mr. Brentano, now "notorious" -- passage of his budget speech of 1863, and what Marx quoted of what he said, or else what he "lyingly added" or "suppressed". In order to oblige Mr. Brentano as far as possible, let us take as our basis the immaculate Hansard, and in his own translation.

"In ten years from 1842 to 1852 inclusive, the taxable income of the country, as nearly as we can make out, increased by 6 per cent; hut in eight years, from 1853 to 1861, the income of the country again increased upon the basis taken by 20 per cent. That is a fact so singular and striking as to seem almost incredible."

Mr. Brentano himself has nothing against Marx's quotation of this sentence, apart from the fact that it is allegedly taken from The Theory of the Exchanges. But of Brentano's quotation it must be said here that it too is far removed from giving "the real budget speech". He excises Mr. Gladstone's following excursus on the causes of this astonishing augmentation without even indicating the omission with dots. -- Further:

"Such, Sir, is the state of the case as regards the general progress of accumulation; but, for one, I must say that I should look with some degree of pain, and with much apprehension, upon this extraordinary and almost intoxicating growth, if it were my belief that it is confined to the class of persons who may be described as in easy circumstances. The figures which I have quoted take little or no cognizance of the condition of those who do not pay income tax; or, in other words, sufficiently accurate for general truth, they do not take cognizance of the property of the labouring population, or of the increase of its income."

There now follows the sentence which according to Mr. Brentano was "lyingly added" by Marx, but which on the testimony of all eight morning papers of April 17 was certainly uttered by Mr. Gladstone:

"The augmentation I have described, and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property." (The Times, The Manning Star, The Manning Advertiser, Daily Telegraph.) ".. is entirely confined to the augmentation of Capital". (Manning Herald, Standard, The Daily News, Manning Post)

After the word "income", Hansard immediately continues with the words:

"Indirectly, indeed, the mere augmentation of Capital is of the utmost advantage to the labouring class, because that augmentation cheapens the commodity which in the whole business of production comes into direct competition with labour."

Although Hansard omits the "notorious" sentence, it says in substance just what the other papers say: it would be very embarrassing for the speaker if this intoxicating augmentation were confined to CLASSES IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES, but although it pains him, this augmentation he has described is confined to people who do not belong to the working class and who are rich enough to pay income tax; yes, it is indeed a "mere augmentation of Capital"!

And here, finally, the secret of Mr. Brentano's fury stands revealed. He reads the sentence in the Inaugural Address, finds in it an embarrassing admission, obtains the Hansard version, fails to find the embarrassing sentence in it, and hurries to publish to the world: Marx lyingly added the sentence in form and in content! -- Marx shows him the sentence in The Times, The Morning Star, The Morning Advertiser. Now finally, for appearance's sake at least, Mr. Brentano must make a "detailed comparison of texts" and discovers -- what? That The Times, The Morning Star, The Morning Advertiser "fully coincide materially" with Hansard! Unfortunately he overlooks the fact that the "lyingly added" sentence must then fully coincide materially with Hansard, and that then in the end it must turn out that Hansard coincides materially with the Inaugural Address.

The whole hullabaloo therefore because Mr. Brentano had neglected to undertake the detailed textual comparison ascribed to him by Mr. Sedley Taylor, and because, in fact, he had himself not understood what Mr. Gladstone had said according to Hansard. Of course, this was not that easy, for although Mr. Brentano claims that this speech

"aroused the interest and admiration of the entire educated world ... notably through ... its clarity",

readers have been able to see for themselves that in the Hansard version it is presented in a particularly stilted, complicated and involved language, tying itself up in its own repetitions. In particular the sentence stating that the increase in Capital is of extraordinary advantage to the worker, because it cheapens the commodity which in the business of production comes into direct competition with labour, is sheer nonsense. If a commodity comes into Competition with labour, and this commodity (for example, machinery) is cheapened, then the first and immediate result is a fall in wages, and according to Mr. Gladstone this should be "of great benefit to the workers"! How philanthropic it was of some London morning papers, i. e. The Morning Star, in their "necessarily bungling" reports, to replace the above incomprehensible sentence by what Mr. Gladstone probably wanted to say, namely that an increase in Capital is of benefit to the workers because it cheapens the main articles of consumption!

When Mr. Gladstone said that he should look with some degree of pain and much apprehension at this intoxicating growth if he believed that it was confined to classes in easy circumstances -- whether Mr. Gladstone thought thereby of another growth of wealth than that of which he spoke, namely, in his opinion, of the greatly improved situation of the entire nation; whether he forgot at that moment that he was speaking of the increase in income of the classes that pay income tax and of no others: this we cannot know. Marx has been charged with forgery, and what is at issue is the text and the grammatical meaning of what Mr. Gladstone said, and not what he possibly wanted to say. Mr. Brentano does not know the latter either, and on this point Mr. Gladstone, 27 years later, is no longer a competent authority. And in no way does this concern us.

The abundantly clear meaning of the words is: taxable income has undergone an intoxicating augmentation. I should be very sorry if this augmentation just described were confined to classes of property, but it is confined to them, since the workers have no income liable to tax, and it is thus purely an increase in Capital! But the latter, too, is of advantage to the workers, because they, etc.

And now Marx:

"This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... is entirely confined to classes of property."

Thus runs the sentence in the Inaugural Address, where it provided the occasion for this whole jolly controversy. But since Mr. Brentano has no longer dared to claim that Marx lyingly added it, since then the Inaugural Address has no longer been mentioned at all, and all attacks have been directed against the quotation of this passage in Capital There Marx adds the following sentence:

"but... but it must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption."

The "arbitrarily thrown-together mosaic of sentences torn from their context" in Marx thus states "materially", "only formally more contracted", exactly what the immaculate Hansard has Gladstone say. The only reproach which can be levelled at Marx is that he utilised The Morning Star and not Hansard, and thus, in the final sentence, placed words of sense in Mr. Gladstone's mouth, although he had spoken nonsense. Further, according to Hansard:

"But, besides this, a more direct and a larger benefit has, it may safely be asserted, been conferred upon the mass of the people [of the country]. It is a matter of profound and inestimable consolation to reflect, that while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have become less poor. I will not presume to determine whether the wide interval which separates the extremes of wealth and poverty is less or more wide than it has been in former times."

In Marx:

"...while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say."

Marx gives only the two rare positive statements which, in Hansard, swim in a whole tureen of phrases as trivial as they are unctuous. It can be stated with certainty that they lose nothing thereby, but rather gain.

Finally the conclusion, according to Hansard:

"But if we look to the average condition of the British labourer, whether peasant, or miner, or operative, or artisan, we know from varied and indubitable evidence that during the last twenty years such an addition has been made to his means of subsistence as we may almost pronounce to be without example in the history of any country and of any age."

This sentence is quoted in the Inaugural Address a few lines above the "notorious" one just given. There we find:

"Such are the official statements published by order of Parliament in 1864, during the millennium of free trade, at a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer told the House of Commons that:

'The average condition of the British labourer has improved in a degree we know to be extraordinary and unexampled in the history of any country or any age.'"

Thus everything essential is cited. But that this may be read in the Inaugural Address, original edition, p. 4, this fact is stubbornly concealed from his readers by Mr. Brentano; however, his readers cannot check upon him, for we cannot possibly present each of them with a copy of the Address, as we did Mr. Sedley Taylor.

Notabene: In his second reply (Documents, No. 6) Marx only had to defend the Inaugural Address, since up to then Mr. Brentano had not got the passage in Capital into his nagging range. And in his following rejoinder (Documents, No.7) Mr. Brentano's attack is still directed against the Inaugural Address and Marx's defence of this.

It is only after Marx's death that a new turn comes, and this not through Mr. Brentano but through his Cambridge shield-bearer. Only now is it discovered that in Capital Marx suppressed the resonant declarations made by Mr. Gladstone about the unexampled improvement in the condition of the British worker, and that this converted Mr. Gladstone's meaning into the contrary.

And here we have to say that Marx missed the opportunity for a brilliant burst of rhetoric. The whole section in the introduction to which this speech by Gladstone is quoted has the purpose of furnishing evidence that the condition of the great majority of the British working class was straitened and unworthy, just at the time of this intoxicating augmentation of wealth. What a magnificent contrast Gladstone's selfsame pompous words about the happy condition of the British working class, ~a condition] unexampled in the history of any country and any age, would have provided to this evidence of mass poverty, drawn from the official publications of Parliament itself!

But if Marx wished to refrain from such a rhetorical effect, he had no reason to quote these words of Gladstone's. Firstly, they are nothing hut the standard phrases which every British Chancellor of the Exchequer believes it to be his moral duty to repeat in good or even in tolerable business periods; they are thus meaningless. And secondly, Gladstone himself retracted them within a year; in his next budget speech of April 7, 1864, at a time of even greater industrial prosperity, he spoke of masses "on the border of pauperism", and of branches of business in which wages have not increased", and proclaimed -- according to Hansard:

"Again, and yet more at large, what is human life, but, in the great majority of cases, a struggle for existence?" *

* And here some more from this speech, according to Hansard: the number of paupers had fallen to 840,000. "That amount, however, does not include persons who are dependent upon charitable establishments; or who are relieved by private almsgiving.... But, besides all those whom it comprises, think of those who arc on the borders of that region, think how many of the labouring classes are struggling manfully but with difficulty to maintain themselves in a position above the place of paupers." In the congregation of a clergyman in the East End of London, 12,000 out of 13,000 souls were always on the verge of actual want; a well-known philanthropist had declared that there were whole districts in the East End of London in which you cannot find an omnibus or a cab, in which there ii no street music, nor even a street beggar... The means to wage the struggle for existence were, however, somewhat better than previously (!) ... In many places wages had increased, but in many others they had not, etc. And this jeremiad came just one year after the pompous announcement of the "unexampled" improvement!

But Marx quotes this other budget speech of Gladstone's immediately after that of 1863, and if Mr. Gladstone himself, on April 7, 1864, declared that the unexampled blessings were non-existent, those blessings for the existence of which he had possessed "varied and indubitable evidence", then for Marx there was no longer the slightest shadow of a reason to quote these vivacious protestations, which were unfortunately ephemeral, even for Mr. Gladstone. He could content himself with the speaker's admissions that while the incomes of 150 pounds sterling and over had augmented intoxicatingly, the poor had in any case become less poor, and that the interval between extreme wealth and extreme poverty had scarcely been reduced.

We shall not comment on the fact that it is the habit of the official German economists to quote Marx in sentences torn from context. If he had created a hullabaloo in every such case, as Mr. Brentano has done here, he would never have been finished.

But now let us examine more closely the unexampled augmentation of the means of subsistence enjoyed at that time by the British labourer, peasant or miner, artisan or operative.

The peasant is in England and the greater part of Scotland only an agricultural day labourer. In 1861 there were a total of 1,098,261 such peasants, of whom 204,962 lived as farmhands on tenant farms. * From 1849 to 1859 his money wage had increased by 1 shilling, in a few cases by 2 shillings a week, but in the final analysis this was mostly only a nominal increase. His position in 1863, the really abject housing conditions under which he lived, are described by Dr. Hunter (Public Health, VII Report, 1864):

"The costs occasioned by the agricultural labourer are fixed at the lowest figure at which he can live."

* The figures are taken partly from the census of 1861, partly from the report of the CHILDREN'S EMPLOYMENT COMMISSION. 1863-l867. [Census of England and Wales for the year 1861, London, 1863; Children's Employment Commission (1862), Report (I- VI) of the Commissioners, London, 1863. -- MECW Ed]

According to the same report, the food intake of a part of the day labourers' families (particularly in eight named counties) was below the absolute minimum necessary to avert starvation diseases. And Professor Thorold Rogers, a political supporter of Gladstone, declared in 1866 (A History of Agriculture and Prices) that the agricultural day labourer had once again become a serf, and, as he demonstrated at length, a poorly fed and poorly housed serf, much worse off than his ancestor at the time of Arthur Young (1770 to 1780), and incomparably worse than the day labourer in the 14th and 15th centuries. So Gladstone had no luck at all with the "peasants".

But how about the "miner"? On this we have the parliamentary report of 1866.a In 1861, 565,875 miners were working in the United Kingdom, 246,613 of them in coal mines. In the latter the wages of the men had risen slightly, and they mostly did an eight-hour shift, while the youngsters had to work 14 to 15 hours. Mine inspection was just a farce: there were 12 inspectors for 3,217 mines! The result was that the lives of the miners were sacrificed wholesale in largely avoidable explosions; the mine-owners compensated themselves in general for the small wage increases by wage deductions based on false weights and measures. In the ore mines, according to the report of the ROYAL COMMISSION of 1864, conditions were still worse.

But the "artisan"? Let us take the metalworkers, altogether 396,998. Of these, some 70,000 to 80,000 were machine fitters, and their situation was in fact good, thanks to the toughness of their old, strong and rich trade association. For the other metalworkers too, provided full physical strength and skill were called for, a certain improvement had taken place, as was natural with business having again become better since 1859 and 1860. In contrast, the situation of the women and children also employed (10,000 women and 30,000 under 18 in Birmingham and district alone) was miserable enough, and that of the nail makers (26,130) and chain makers miserable in the extreme.

In the textile industry, the 456,646 cotton Spinners and weavers, and with them 12,556 calico printers, are decisive. And they must have been very surprised to hear of this unexampled happiness-in April 1863, at the height of the cotton famine and the American Civil War, at the time (October 1862) when 60 per cent of the spindles and 58 per cent of the looms stood idle, and the remainder were only working 2-3 days a week; when over 50,000 cotton operatives, individually or with families, were supported by the Poor Law or the relief committee and (in March 1863) 135,625 were employed by the same committee at starvation wages on public works or in sewing schools! (Watts, The Facts of the Cotton Famine, 1866, p.21 1.) The other textile operatives, particularly in the wool and linen branches, were relatively prosperous; the lack of cotton increased their employment.

The reports of the CHILDREN'S EMPLOYMENT COMMISSION give us the best information on how things looked in a number of smaller branches of business: hosiery -- 120,000 workers, of whom only 4,000 were protected by the Factory Act, amongst the others many quite young children, colossally overworked; lace-making and dressing, mostly cottage industry -- of 150,000 workers only 10,000 protected by the Factory Act, colossal overworking of children and girls; straw-plaiting and straw-hat-making -- 40,000, almost all children, disgustingly slave-driven; finally the manufacture of clothing and shoes, employing 370,218 female workers for outerwear and millinery, 380,716 ditto for underwear and -- in England and Wales alone -- 573,380 male workers, including 273,223 shoemakers and 146,042 tailors, of whom between l/5 and 1/4 were under 20. Of these 1 1/4 million, a maximum of 30 per cent of the men were passably off, working for private customers. The rest were exposed, as in all the branches of business mentioned in this paragraph, to exploitation through middle men, factors, agents, SWEATERS as they are called in England, and this alone describes their lot: terrible overwork for a wretched wage.

Things were no better with the "unexampled" fortune of the workers in paper-making (100,000 workers, half women), pottery (29,000), hat-making (15,000 in England alone), the glass industry (15,000), book printing (35,000), artificial flower-making (11,000), etc., etc.

In short, the CHILDREN'S EMPLOYMENT COMMISSION demanded that no fewer than 1,400,000 women, young people and children should be placed under the protection of the Factory Act, in order to guard them from mostly ruinous overwork.

And finally the number of PAUPERS dependent upon poor relief from public funds in 1863: 1,079,382.

On this basis we may make an unofficial list of those workers unquestionably very badly off in 1863: agricultural day labourers in round figures 1,100,000; cotton operatives 469,000; seamstresses and milliners 751,000; tailors and shoemakers, after the deduction of 30%, 401,000; lace-makers 150,000; paper-makers 100,000; hosiery workers 120,000; smaller branches investigated by the CHILDRENS EMPLOYMENT COMMISSION 189,000; and finally PAUPERS 1,079,000. Together 4,549,000 workers, added to which, in some cases, their family members.

And 1863 was a good business year. The crisis of 1857 had been fully overcome, demand was rising rapidly, with the exception of the cotton industry nearly all branches of business were very busy. So where is the "unexampled" improvement to be found?

The factory legislation of the forties had decisively improved the lot of those workers subject to it. But in 1863 this benefited only the workers employed in wool, linen and silk, altogether about 270,000, while the cotton operatives were starving. For bleaching workers and dye workers, legal protection existed Only on paper. Further: in branches of work in which full male strength and sometimes dexterity are indispensable, the resistance of the workers, organised in trade associations, had forced through for themselves a share of the proceeds of the favourable business period, and it may be said that on the average for these branches of work, involving heavy male labour, the living standard of the workers had risen decisively, though it is still ridiculous to describe this improvement as "unexampled". But while the great mass of productive work has been transferred to machines operated by weaker men, by women and young workers, the politicians like to treat the strong men employed in heavy work as the only workers, and to judge the whole working class according to their standard.

Against the 4 1/2 million worse-off workers and PAUPERS detailed above, we have, as well-off, 270,000 textile workers in wool, linen and silk. Further we may assume that of the 376,000 metal workers one third were well-off, one third middling, and only the last third, including the workers under 18, the nail-makers, chain-smiths, and women, were badly off. We may classify the situation of the 566,000 miners as medium-good. The situation of the building craftsmen may be considered as good, apart from those in the cotton districts. Amongst the joiners, at most 1/3 were well-off, the great mass worked for blood-sucking SWEATERS. Amongst the railway employees there was already at that period colossal overworking, which has only brought about organised resistance in the last 20 years. In short, we may add together in total scarcely one million of whom we may say that their situation had improved in relation to the improvement in the business and the profits of the Capitalists; what remains over is in a middling situation, has a few, on the whole insignificant, benefits from the better business period, or consists of such a mixture of working people according to sex and age that the improvements for the men are offset by the overworking of the women and young workers.

And if this should not suffice, then one should consult the "Reports on PUBLIC HEALTH" which became necessary precisely because the "unexampled" improvement for the working class in the 20 years up to 1863 showed itself as typhus, cholera and other jolly epidemics, which finally spread from the working-class quarters to the genteel areas of the cities. Here the unexampled "augmentation of the means of subsistence" of the British worker is investigated with respect to housing and food, and it is found that in many cases his dwelling was simply a centre of infection, and his nourishment was on the borderline, or even beneath the border at which starvation diseases necessarily occur.

This was the real condition of the British working class at the beginning of 1863. This was the face of the "unexampled" improvement for the working class of which Mr. Gladstone boasted. And if Marx is to he blamed for anything, it is that he did Mr. Gladstone an unearned service by omitting his bragging statement.

Conclusion: Firstly, Marx "lyingly added" nothing.

Secondly, he "suppressed" nothing about which Mr. Gladstone might have a right to complain.

And thirdly, the octopus-like tenacity with which Mr. Brentano and his companions cling to this single quotation amongst the many thousands of quotations in Marx's writing proves that they know only too well "how Karl Marx quotes" -- namely correctly.

10. Documents

1. I. The Incriminated Quotations

The original edition is entitled: "Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men's International Association, established September 28, 1864, at a Public Meeting held at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London." Price one penny. Printed at the "Bee-Hive" Newspaper Office, 10, Bolt Court, Fleet Street, 1864. * The address begins: "It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivalled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce." By way of proof, facts are quoted from the PUBLIC HEALTH Reports about the poor nutrition of various groups of urban workers and agricultural day labourers in the country. It then continues:

"Such are the official statements published by order of Parliament in 1864, during the millennium of free trade, at a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer told the House of Commons that

"'the average condition of the British labourer has improved in a degree we know to be extraordinary and unexampled in the history of any country or any age.'

"Upon these official congratulations jars the dry remark of the official Public Health Report:

"'The public health of a country means the health of its masses, and the masses will scarcely be healthy unless, to their very base, they be at least moderately prosperous.'

"Dazzled by the 'Progress of the Nation' statistics dancing before his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy:

'From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent; in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible!... This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,' adds Mr. Gladstone, 'is entirely confined to classes of property.'" *

In German translation: [Now gives German translation of the above six paragraphs.]

2. No. 2.

CAPITAL

1. MARX, CAPITAL, VOLUME 1, 3RD EDITION, pp. 670-672

After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph of the Registrar-General of the British people:

"Rapidly as the population has increased, it has not kept pace with the progress of industry and wealth." [101]

Let us turn now to the direct agents of this industry, or the producers of this wealth, to the working class.

"It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of this country," says Gladstone, "that while there was a decrease in the consuming power of the people, and while there was an increase in the privations and distress of the labouring class and operatives, there was at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, and a constant increase of Capital." [102]

Thus spoke this unctuous minister in the House of Commons of February 13th, 1843. On April 16th, 1863, 20 years later, in the speech in which he introduced his Budget:

"From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent.... In the 8 years from 1853 to 1861, it had increased from the basis taken in 1853, by 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible ... this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... entirely confined to classes of property ... must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say." [104]

How lame an anti-climax! If the working class has remained "poor", only "less poor" in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class "an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power", then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have. As to the cheapening of the means of subsistence, the official statistics, e. g. the accounts of the LONDON ORPHAN ASYLUM, show an increase in price of 20% for the average of the three years 1860-1862, compared with 1851-1853. In the following three years, 1863-1865, there was a progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk,, sugar, salt, coals, and a number of other necessary means of subsistence. Gladstone's next budget speech of April 7th, 1864, is a Pindaric dithyrambus on the advance of surplus-value-making and the happiness of the people "tempered by poverty". He speaks of masses "on the border of pauperism", of branches of trade in which "wages have not increased", and finally sums up the happiness of the working-class in the words: "human life is but, in nine cases out of ten, a struggle for existence". Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official considerations, declares roundly:

"I do not, of course, deny that money wages have been augmented by this increase of Capital" (in the last ten years), "but this apparent advantage is to a great extent lost, because many of the necessaries of life are becoming dearer" (he believes because of the fall in value of the precious metals) "...THE RICH GROW RAPIDLY RICHER, whilst there is no perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the industrial classes.... They (the labourers) become almost the slaves of the tradesman, to whom they owe money.")

(Footnote #104) See the official accounts in the Blue book: "MISCELLANEOUS STATISTICS OF THE UN. KINGDOM", PART VI, LONDON, 1866, pp. 260-273, passim. An addition to the second edition. Instead of the statistics of orphan asylums &c., the declamations of the ministerial journals in recommending dowries for the Royal children might also serve. The greater dearness of the means of subsistence 15 never forgotten there.

(Footnote 105) "THINK OF THOSE, WHO ARE ON THE BORDER OF THAT REGION (PAUPERISM)", "WAGES... IN OTHERS NOT INCREASED ... HUMAN LIFE IS BUT, IN NINE CASES OUT OF TEN, A STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE." (Gladstone, HOUSE OF COMMONS, 7th April, 1864). The continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's budget speeches of 1863 and 1864 were characterised by an English writer by the following quotation from Molière:

"Voila' l'homme en effet. Il va du blanc au noir.

Il condamne au matin ses sentiments du soir.

Importun a' tout autre, a' bi meme incommode,

Il change a' tous moments d'esprit comme de mode."

(The Theory of the Exchanges etc., London, 1864, p. 135).

(Footnote 106) H. Fawcett, l. c., [The Economic Position of the British Labourer] pp. 67-68 As to the increasing dependence of labourers on the retail shopkeepers, this is the consequence of the frequent oscillations and interruptions of their employment.

11. II. BRENTANO AND MARX

1. No. 3. THE CHARGE

1. CONCORDIA. No. 10, MARCH 7, 1872

How Karl Marx Quotes

The following passage may be found in the Inaugural Address [note by Brentano: Reprinted in the Volksstaat, No. 5 of January 17, 1872] of the International Working Men's Association written by Karl Marx.

"Dazzled by the 'Progress of the Nation' statistics dancing before his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy: 'From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent; in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853,20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible!... This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,' adds Mr. Gladstone, 'is entirely confined to classes of property.'"

This quotation by Marx has become famous. We have discovered it in a considerable number of writings. However, the authors rarely quoted the Inaugural Address of the International as the source upon which they had drawn. They inferred that they had themselves read Gladstone's budget speech. To what extent this was the case may be seen from the following comparison with Gladstone's speech (see Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series, Vol. 170, p.243 ff.):

"The Income Tax, at 7d. in the pound, in the year 1842 3, attaching to Great Britain only, and in Great Britain only to incomes of £150 and upwards, was assessed upon an aggregate amount of income in the schedules I have named reaching £156,000,000. Upon the very same area, with the same limitations, in 1860-1 the amount of assessed income was £221,000,000. Further, I am not aware that there has been any change in the machinery of the tax, or any improvement in the powers of levying the tax, as compared with the powers of escaping it, that will in any way account for the difference. On the contrary, certain concessions and relaxations have from time to time been enacted by the Legislature, which, as far as they go, would rather tell in the opposite direction. The difference, however, amounts to no less than £65,000,000 of annual income, or two-sevenths of the whole annual taxable income of the country within the area described. That is a most remarkable result; but there is a certain feature of that result which, when carefully examined, is yet more remarkable; and that is the accelerated rate of increase in the latter portion of that period. I again invite the attention of the Committee for a few minutes. I compare two periods -- one of them before 1853, and the other since 1853, the year when the basis was altered. In eight years from 1842 to 1852 inclusive, the liable to tax income of the country, as nearly as we can make out, increased by 6 per cent; but in eight years, from 1853 to 1861, the income of the country again increased upon the basis taken by 20 per cent. That is a fact so singular and striking as to seem almost incredible. [...]

"Such, Sir, is the State of the case as regards the general progress of accumulation; but, for one, I must say that I should look with some degree of pain, and with much apprehension, upon this extraordinary and almost intoxicating growth, if it were my belief that it is confined to the class of persons who may be described as in easy circumstances The figures which I have quoted take little or no cognizance of the condition of those who do not pay income tax; or, in other words, sufficiently accurate for general truth, they do not take cognizance of the property of the labouring population, or of the increase of its income. Indirectly, indeed, the mere augmentation of Capital is of the utmost advantage to the labouring class, because that augmentation cheapens the commodity which in the whole business of production comes into direct competition with labour. But, besides this, a snare direct and a larger benefit has, it may safely be asserted, been conferred upon the mass of the people of the country. It is matter of profound and inestimable consolation to reflect, that while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have become less poor. I will not presume to determine whether the wide interval which separates the extremes of wealth and poverty is less or more wide than it has been in former times. But if we look to the average condition of the British labourer, whether peasant, or miner, or operative, or artisan, we know from varied and indubitable evidence that during the last twenty years such an addition has been made to his means of subsistence as we may almost pronounce to be without example in the history of any country and of any age."

What is the relationship between this speech and the quotation by Marx? Gladstone first makes the point that there has undoubtedly been a colossal increase in the income of the country. This is proved for him by the income tax. But income tax takes notice only of incomes of 150 pounds sterling and over. Persons with lower incomes pay no income tax in England. The fact that Gladstone mentions this so that his yardstick can be properly appreciated is utilised by Marx to have Gladstone say: "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property." Yet this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech. It says quite the opposite. Marx has added the sentence lyingly, both in form and in content!

2. No. 4.

Karl Marx's Reply

1. Der Volksstaat, No. 44. Saturday, June 1, 1872

A friend has sent me, from Germany, Concordia. Zeitschrift für die Arbeiterfrage, No. 10, dated March 7, in which this "organ of the German Manufacturers' Association" publishes an editorial entitled "How Karl Marx Quotes".

In the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association I quote, amongst other material, a portion of

Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863, which is not contained in Hansard's semi-official report of parliamentary debates. On this basis, with comfortable manufacturers' logic the Concordia concludes: "This sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech", and jubilates in the fullness of its heart with this mocking sentence in manufacturers' German, printed in mocking bold face:

"Marx has added the sentence lyingly, both in form and in content!"

It would, in fact, be extremely strange if the Inaugural Address, originally printed in English in London under Gladstone's very eyes, had placed in his mouth a sentence interpolated by me, a sentence that, for seven and a half years, circulated unchallenged in the London press, to be finally detected by the "learned men" of the German Manufacturers' Association in Berlin.

The sentence in question of the Inaugural Address reads as follows:

"This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property" (p.6, Inaugural Address etc.). (In the German translation literally: )

In an article in The Fortnightly Review (November 1870), which attracted great attention and was discussed by all the London press, Mr. Beesly, Professor of History at the university here, quoted as follows, p. 518:

"An intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, as Mr. Gladstone observed, entirely confined to classes of property." (In the German translation: )

Yet Professor Beesly's article appeared six years later than the Inaugural Address! Good! Let us now take a specialised publication, intended solely for the City and published not only before the appearance of the Inaugural Address, but even before the International Working Men's Association was founded It is entitled: The Theory of Exchanges. The Bank Charter Act of 1844 London 1864, published by T. Cautley Newby, 30, Welbeck Street. It examines Gladstone's budget speech at length and p. 134 gives the following quotation from this speech:

"This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property." (In the German translation: ...)

That is, word for word, exactly what I quoted.

This proves irrefutably that the German Manufacturers' Association "lied both in form and in content" in decrying this "sentence as a fabrication "by me"!

Incidentally: honest old Concordia printed in bold face another passage, in which Gladstone prattled about an elevation of the English working class, over the last 20 years, that was supposedly "extraordinary and unparalleled in all countries and in all periods". The bold-face type is supposed to indicate that I had suppressed this passage. On the contrary! In the Inaugural Address I emphasised most strongly the screaming contrast between this shameless phrase and the "APPALLING STATISTICS" as Professor Beesly rightly calls them, contained in the official English reports on the same period. [Marx note: Other whimsical apologetics from the same speech are dealt with in my work Capital (p.638, 639).]

The author of The Theory of the Exchanges quoted, like myself, not from Hansard, but from a London newspaper which, on April 17, published the April 16 budget speech. In my collectanea of cuttings for 1863, I have searched in vain for the relevant extract and thus, also, for the name of the newspaper that published it. This is, however, not important. Although the parliamentary reports of the London newspapers always differ from one another, I was certain that none of them could completely suppress such a striking quotation from Gladstone. So I consulted The Times of April 17, 1863 -- it was then, as now, Gladstone's organ -- and there I found, on p.7, column 5, in the report on the budget speech:

"That is the state of the case as regards the wealth of this country. I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to classes who are in easy circumstances. [Marx note: The words "EASY CLASSES", "CLASSES IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES" were apparently first introduced by Wakefield for the really rich portion of the propertied class.] This takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described, and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns. n an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property."

In the German translation: ...

So, on April 16, 1863, Mr. Gladstone declared "both in form and in content" in the House of Commons, as reported in his own organ, The Times, on April 17, 1863 that "this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to the classes possessed of property", and his apprehension gives him a sort of shiver, but only because of his scruples that this was confined to one part of this class, the part in really easy circumstances.

Italiam, Italiam! Finally we arrive at Hansard In its edition, here botchily corrected, Mr. Gladstone was bright enough clumsily to excise the passage that would be, after all, compromising on the lips of an English Chancellor of the Exchequer. This is, incidentally, traditional English parliamentary practice, and by no means the invention of little Lasker versus Bebel. A careful comparison of Gladstone's speech itself, as it appeared in The Times, and its subsequent form, as distorted by the same Gladstone, would provide an amusing description of this unctuous, phrase-mongering, quibbling and strictly-religious bourgeois hero, who timidly displays his piousness and his liberal "ATTITUDES OF MIND".

One of the most infuriating things in my work Capital consists in the masses of official proof describing how manufacturers work, something in which no scholar could previously find a thing wrong. In the form of a rumour this even reached the ears of the gentlemen of the German Manufacturers' Association, but they thought:

"Was kein Verstand der Verstländigen sieht,

Das über in Einfalt ein kindlich' Gemüt."

No sooner said than done. They find a suspicious-looking quotation in the Inaugural Address and turn for information to a business friend in London, the first best Mundella, and he, being a manufacturer himself, rushes to despatch overseas, in black and white, the extract from Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Now they have my fabrication secret. I manufacture not only the text, but the quotations too. Drunk with victory, they trumpet out to the world "How Karl Marx Quotes!" So my wares were discredited, once and for all, and, as is fitting for manufacturers, in the way of normal business, without the expense of Teamed men.

The irksome subsequent events will perhaps teach the Manufacturing Associates that, however well they may know how to forge goods, they are as well fitted to judge literary goods as a donkey is to play the lute.

London, May 23, 1872

Karl Marx

3. No. 5.

RETORT BY ANONYMOUS

1. CONCORDIA, No. 27, July 4, 1872

HOW KARL MARX DEFENDS HIMSELF

1. I

Our readers will perhaps recall the article "How Karl Marx Quotes" in No. 10 of this paper on March 7 this year. In it we dealt with a passage from the Inaugural Address of the International, written by Karl Marx, a passage which has won a certain fame and is frequently quoted by the Social Democrats as convincing proof of the irrevocable ruin of the working class should the state and social conditions of today persist. Here Marx quotes Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863. In this speeds Gladstone first notes that there has been "an extraordinary and almost intoxicating growth" of the income of the country, and he uses the increase in income tax [revenue] to prove this. But the figures he quotes for this purpose "take little or no cognizance of the condition of those who do not pay income tax"; they "do not take cognizance of the property of the labouring population, or of the increase of its income". Persons with an income under 150 pounds sterling, in fact, pay no income tax in England. And the fact that Gladstone had mentioned this to allow a proper appreciation of his yardstick was utilised by Marx in order to have Gladstone say: "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property. However, this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech. On the contrary, Gladstone said that he did not believe this augmentation "had been confined to the class of persons who may be described as in easy circumstances". And indignant at the impudence with which Marx quoted distortingly, we exclaimed: "Marx has added the sentence lyingly, both in form and in content!"

This was a serious charge; combined with the convincing evidence provided, it was absolutely devastating for the widespread trust amongst our Social Democrats in the unparalleled and thorough learnedness, truthfulness and infallibility of the London oracle. It could therefore not be allowed to pass without a refutation, or at least something which looked like a refutation. In number 44 of the Volksstaat dated June l, * Marx attempted to give such a refutation. But our opponent has by no means been able to wash himself clean of the charge of mala fides in his quotations. In fact, the ways and means of his defence are more suitable than anything to prove his mala fides. The brazenness, namely, with which he once again abuses the fact that the readers of the Volksstaat have no possibility of checking his claims, this brazenness even exceeds his frivolity in quotation.

* [Brentano note: That is almost a full three months after the article appeared in the Concordia Despite this, the Volksstaat was impudent enough scarcely 14 days after carrying Marx's rebuttal to accuse us of "heroically silencing" this rebuttal. We believe that the Volksstaat had no reason to press so hard for the second, and sharper, treatment of its lord and master. Incidentally, the reason for the delay in our reply is partly due to the fact that one of the sources cited by Marx was not available here and had to be obtained from England, partly to the fact that the elucidation of this quotation demanded lengthy extracts from the relevant sources and consequently the above article became unusually long, so that, for reasons of space, we were obliged to postpone publication several times. The editors of the "Concordia".]

Marx naturally does not go so far as to challenge the correctness of our quotation from the shorthand report of Parliament. His immediate aim is to prove his bona fides in quotation, and to this end he refers to the fact that others have quoted like he did. He writes:

"In an article in The Fortnightly Review (November 1870), which attracted great attention and was discussed by all the London press, Mr. Beesly, Professor of History at the university here, quoted as follows, p. 518: 'An intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, as Mr. Gladstone observed, entirely confined to classes of property.' -- Yet Professor Beesly's article appeared six years later than the Inaugural Address!"

Quite right! Only the addition of another "yet" has been forgotten. This article by Professor Beesly deals, in fact, with the history of the International, and as the author himself informs every enquirer, was written on the basis of material provided him by Marx. And there is still more. At this point it is not Beesly who is quoting Gladstone at all; he is merely saying that the Inaugural Address of the International contains this quotation. "From this alarming statistics," Beesly writes, "the Address turns to the income-tax returns, which show that the taxable incomes of the country have increased by 20% in eight years, 'an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power', as Mr. Gladstone observed, entirely confined" etc. -- A fine way of proof indeed! You trick some person who does not know your dishonesty into accepting a lying statement; this person repeats it in good faith; and then you cite this and the honesty of the person who repeated the statement in order to prove the correctness of the statement and your own honesty. -- Marx continues his defence:

"Let us now take a specialised publication, intended solely for the City and published not only before the appearance of the Inaugural Address, but even before International Working Men's Association was founded. It is entitled: The Theory of Exchanges. The Bank Charter Act of 1844, London 1864, published by T. Cautley Newby, 30, Welbeck Street. It examines Gladstone's budget speech at length and p. 134 gives the following quotation from this speech: 'This intoxicating augmentation' etc., that is, word for word, exactly what I quoted. -- This proves irrefutably that the German Manufacturers' Association 'lied in form' in decrying this 'sentence' as a fabrication 'by me'!... The author of The Theory of the Exchanges," Marx then continued, "quoted, like myself, not from Hansard, but from a London newspaper which, on April 17, published the April 16 budget speech."

And in fact the author of this hook, which incidentally is a vulgar diatribe, quoted from Hansard just as little as did Marx. But Marx, as we shall soon show, also did not even quote from a London newspaper. First, however, it must be noted here that when we stated that Marx had lyingly added the sentence in question to Gladstone's speech, we did not claim, either "in form or In content", that he himself had also fabricated it. This would only be the case if Marx himself had been the fabricator of that still very obscure book, though one might be tempted to believe this on account of the ghastly style in which it is written. The source from which Marx quotes this sentence is actually this book itself, and this is also the reason why, as he claims in his "collectanea of cuttings for 1863", he has "searched in vain for the relevant extract and thus, also, for the name of the newspaper that published it"! This origin of Marx's quotation is shown clearly by a comparison of the passage in Capital, his book in which Marx reviews Gladstone's budget speech, and The Theory of the Exchanges There, on p. 639, particularly in Note 103,a this speech is quoted in the absolutely senseless version given verbatim by that book on p. 134. And the glosses too, which Marx bases on the contradiction contained in this version, are already contained in that book, in particular also the quotation from Molière given in Note 105 on p. 640 of Capital; and in the same way the statement of the LONDON ORPHAN ASYLUM about the rising prices of foodstuffs quoted by Marx appears on p. 135 of that book, though Marx bases his claim for its correctness not on that book, but on that book's sources (see Capital, p. 640, Note 104).

Now we ask; does anyone tell a lie only when he himself invents an untruth, or does he not tell a lie quite as much when he repeats it contrary to what he knows, or is hound to know better? We believe that the answer is beyond doubt. And secondly, when Marx repeated the untruth contained in The Theory of the Exchanges, did he not do this contrary to his better knowledge, or should he at least not have known better? The answer here is also simple. The first rule for any interpretation, a rule undoubtedly known to Mr. Marx, is to interpret passages which at first glance contain contradictions -- and thus make no sense -- in such a way that the contradiction disappears; and if the available text appears to make this impossible, one should make a textual criticism rather than believe in the presence of a contradiction. And this was all the more imperative in the case of a speech which aroused the interest and admiration of the entire educated world, notably through its mastery of the material and its clarity. And finally it was an act of frivolity bordering upon the criminal to act in any other way than scrupulously when intending to tear Out of context a passage which provides one half of the contradiction in this version and to cast it as a denunciation of the propertied amongst the propertyless all over the world. Karl Marx should have taken umbrage at this version if only on the basis of general learning, science and conscientiousness; and the criminal frivolity with which he accepts this lying quotation is completely inexcusable in his case, since the full text of Gladstone's speech was available to him. On the one hand, the English newspapers reproduced this speech the day after it was delivered, and, if Dot true to the word, then true to the sense. And then, immediately after the delivery of the speech, Gladstone published it verbatim in his book Financial Statements, London, 1863, which attracted great attention; and on p.403 of that book the speech is printed just as we quoted it. Finally, Marx could refer to the shorthand report of this speech in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, and it is the custom to always quote a speech to Parliament from the shorthand report, even if it contains no contradictions to the necessarily bungling newspaper reports.

But here we come, to be sure, to Marx's third line of defence, and this far exceeds, in its impudent mendacity, anything which came before. Marx actually does not shrink from citing The Times of April 17, 1863 as proof of the correctness of his quotation. The Times of April 17, 1863, p.7, col. 5, line 17ff, reports, however, the speech as follows:

"That is the state of the case as regards the wealth of this country. I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to classes finding themselves in pleasant circumstances. This takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described, and the figures of which are based, I think, upon accurate returns, * is entirely confined to classes of property." (Marx quotes The Times to this point; we quote further.) "Now, the augmentation of Capital is of indirect benefit to the labourer, because it cheapens the commodity which in the business of production comes into direct competition with labour. (Hear, hear!) But we have this profound, and, I must say, inestimable consolation, that, while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. -- Whether the extremes of poverty are less extreme than they were I do not presume to say, but the average condition of the British labourer, we have the happiness to know, has improved during the last 20 years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary, and which we may almost pronounce to be unexampled in the history of any country and of any age. (Cheers)"

* (Note by Brentano: In his German quotation in the Volksstaat Marx omits this relative clause and instead inserts: "which he" (Gladstone) "had just described as 'this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power'." This omission and this insertion too are designed to mislead the reader about the sense of Gladstone's words. The omitted relative clause and in addition the general context show that the sense of the speech is as follows: The augmentation of wealth shown by the income tax returns is certainly confined to the classes of property (since this tax is only imposed upon persons with an income of 150 pounds sterling and over), but with regard to the labouring class, we know, etc.)

A comparison of this Times report with the report after Hansard in the Concordia of March 7 will show that both reports fully coincide materially. The report in The Times just gives, formally more contracted, what the shorthand report by Hansard gives verbatim. Yet despite the fact that the Times report contains the direct opposite of that notorious passage in the Inaugural Address, and the fact that according to the Times report, too, Mr. Gladstone said he believed this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power not to be confined to classes in easy circumstances, Marx has the impudence to write in the Volksstaat of June 1:

"So, on April 16, 1863, Mr. Gladstone declared 'both in form and in content' that 'this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to the classes possessed of property'."

But even more. Since we had already presented to the public the complete text of the speech from Hansard, and this text completely excluded the possibility of any distortion, an attempt is made to delete this very embarrassing circumstance with the phrase in the Hansard "edition, here botchily corrected, Mr. Gladstone was bright enough clumsily to excise the passage that would be, after all, compromising on the lips of an English Chancellor of the Exchequer"! All that is lacking is the claim that Gladstone probably did this in deference to the diatribe The Theory of the Exchanges, which did not appear until 1864!

What can one say about such methods? First we are presented, on the basis of an obscure diatribe, with a quotation which was completely forged, and the contradictory substance of which proved that it was forged, even without confronting it with the original. Called to account in this matter, Marx states that others quoted in the same way as he did, and refers to people whom he himself fooled with this lie. Even more: from the fact that his fuzzy sources accord with him, he tries to fashion an argument to excuse himself and show the correctness of his quotation, as though both of them had drawn upon a joint, correct, third source, though in fact one had only copied from the other. And finally he has the impudence to base himself on newspaper reports which directly contradict him. Indeed, to describe these practices we know only one word, a word with which Marx himself is very familiar (see Capital, p. 257): they are simply "nefarious".

Marx closes his defence with these words: "The irksome subsequent events will perhaps teach the Manufacturing Associates that, however well they may know how to forge goods, they are as well fitted to judge literary goods as a donkey is to play the lute."

We confidently leave it to the reader to decide on which side the forgery and the irksomeness ultimately lie. In a further article we shall explain to Mr. Marx the importance which we attach to the content of Gladstone's words.

2. * * *

The second article, Concordia, No. 28, July 11, 1872, contains absolutely nothing of relevance, and is therefore omitted.

4. No. 6.

MARX'S SECOND REPLY

1. DER VOLKSSTAAT, No. 55, AUGUST 7, 1872

In the Concordia of July 4, the German Manufacturers' Association attempted to prove to me that its "learned men" were as well fitted to judge literary goods as the Association was to forge commercial ones.

With reference to the passage from Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863, as quoted in the Inaugural Address of the International, the manufacturers' organ (No. 10) stated:

"Marx has added the sentence lyingly, both in form and in content."

It thus declares that I fabricated the sentence in both form and content, with hair and bones. Even more: it knows exactly how I did so. The paper writes: "The fact that Gladstone mentioned this, etc., was utilised by Marx in order to hove Gladstone say, etc." By quoting the sentence from a work published before the Inaugural Address, The Theory of the Exchanges, I exposed the crude lie of the manufacturers' organ. As the paper itself relates, it then ordered from London this work which it did not know, and convinced itself of the facts of the matter. How could it lie itself out of the situation? See here:

"When we stated that Marx had lyingly added the sentence in question to Gladstone's speech, we did not claim, either in form or in content, that he himself had also fabricated it."

Here we obviously have a case of equivocation peculiar to the mind of manufacturers. For example, when a manufacturing swindler, in agreement with business colleagues, sends out into the world rolls of ribbon that contain, instead of the alleged three dozen ells only two dozen, then he has in fact lyingly added one dozen ells, precisely because he "has not fabricated" them. Why, moreover, should lyingly added sentences not behave just like lyingly added ells? "The understandings of the greater part of men," says Adam Smith, "are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments", the understandings of the manufacturer included.

Through the Volksstaat, I extended the erudite materials of the manufacturers' organ, not only with the quotation from The Theory of the Exchanges, but also with the pages from my work Capital concerning Gladstone's budget speeches. Now, from the material with which I provided it, the paper attempts to prove that I did not quote the disputed passage from a "London newspaper", but from The Theory of the Exchanges. The chain of arguments is another sample of manufacturers' logic.

I told the manufacturers' sheet that The Theory of the Exchanges quotes on page 134 exactly as I quoted, and it discovers -- that I quoted exactly as The Theory of the Exchanges quotes on page 134.

And further!

"And the glosses too, which Marx bases on the contradiction contained in this version, are already contained in that book."

This is simply a lie. On page 639 of Capital, I give my glosses to the words in Gladstone's speech:

"While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. Whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say."

My remark on this is: "How lame an anti-climax! If the working class has remained 'poor', only 'less poor' in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class 'an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power', then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have." And these "glosses" are nowhere to be found in The Theory of the Exchanges.

"And the glosses too ... are already contained in that hook, in particular also the quotation from Molière given in Note 105 on p. 640 of Capital."

So, "in particular also" I quote Molière, and leave it up to the "learned men" of the Concordia to detect and communicate to the public the fact that the quotation comes from The 'Theory of the Exchanges. In fact, however, I state expressly in Note 105, p. 640 of Capital that the author of The Theory of the Exchanges "characterises with the following quotation from Molière" the "continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's budget speeches".

Finally:

"... in the same way the statement of the LONDON ORPHAN ASYLUM about the rising prices of foodstuffs quoted by Marx appears on p. 135 of that book, though Marx bases his claim for its correctness not on that hook, but on that book's sources (see Capital, p. 640, Note 104)".

The Concordia advisedly forgets to inform its readers that "that book" gives no sources. What was it trying to prove? That I took from that "book" a passage from Gladstone's speech without knowing its source. And how does the Concordia prove it? By the fact that I really did take a quotation from that book, and checked it with the original sources, independent of the book!

Referring to my quotation from Professor Beesly's article in The Fortnightly Review (November 1870), the Concordia remarks.

"This article by Professor Beesly deals, in fact, with the history of the International, and as the author himself informs every enquirer, was written on the basis of material provided him by Marx himself."

Professor Beesly states:

"To no one is the success of the association so much due as to Dr. Karl Marx, who, in his acquaintance with the history and statistics of the industrial movement in all parts of Europe, is, I should imagine, without a rival. I am LARGELY indebted to him for the information contained in this article."

All the material with which I supplied Professor Beesly referred exclusively to the history of the International, and not a word concerned the Inaugural Address, which he had known since its publication. The context in which his above remark stood left so little doubt on this point that The Saturday Review, in a review of his article, more than hinted that he himself was the author of the Inaugural Address. [Brentano note: Professor Beesly drew my attention, in writing, to this quid pro quo.]

The Concordia asserts that Professor Beesly did not quote the passage in question from Gladstone's speech, but only stated "that the Inaugural Address contained this quotation". Let us look into this.

Professor Beesly states:

"The address [...] is probably the most striking and powerful statement of the workman's case as against the middle class that has ever been compressed into a dozen small pages. I wish I had space for copious extracts from it."

After mentioning the "frightful statistics of the Blue Books", to which the Address refers, he goes on:

"From these appalling Statistics the address passes on to the income-tax returns, from which it appeared that the taxable income of the country had increased in eight years twenty per cent, 'an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power', as Mr. Gladstone observed, 'entirely confined to classes of property'."

Professor Beesly sets the words: "as Mr. Gladstone observed" outside quotation marks, Saying these words on his own behalf, and thus proves to the Concordia with the greatest clarity that he knows Gladstone's budget speech -- solely from the quotation in the Inaugural Address! As the London business friend of the German Manufacturers' Association, he is the only man who knows Gladstone's budget speeches, just as he, and he alone, knows: "Persons with an income under 150 pounds sterling, in fact, pay no income tax in England." (See the Concordia, Nos. 10 and 27.) Yet English tax officials suffer from the idée fixe that this tax only stops at incomes under 100 pounds sterling.

Referring to the disputed passage in the Inaugural Address, the manufacturers' paper stated:

"Yet this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech." I proved the contrary with a quotation from the "Times" report of April 17, 1863. I gave the quotation in the Volksstaat in both English and German, since a commentary was necessary on account of Gladstone's assertion that he would "look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were" his "belief that it was confined to the CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES". Basing myself on Wakefield, I declared that the "CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES" -- an expression for which there is no German equivalent -- means the "really rich", "the really prosperous portion" of the propertied classes. Wakefield actually calls the real middle class "THE UNEASY CLASS which is in German roughly "die ungemächliche Klasse". [Marx note: "THE MIDDLE OR UNEASY CLASS" [E. G. Wakefield] ("ENGLAND AND AMERICA", London, 1833, V.1, p.185).]

The manufacturers' worthy organ not only suppresses my exposition, it ends the passage I quoted with the words: "Marx quotes The Times to this point", thus leaving the reader to suppose that it had quoted from my translation; in fact, however, the paper, leaving my version aside, does not translate "CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES" as "wohlhabenden Klassen" but as "Klassen, die sich in angenehmen Verhältnissen befinden". The paper believes its readers capable of understanding that not all sections of the propertied class are "prosperous", though it will always be a "pleasant circumstance" for them to possess property. Even in the translation of my quotation, as given by the Concordia, however, Gladstone describes the progress of Capitalist wealth as "this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power", and remarks that here he has "taken no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population", closing with words to the effect that this "augmentation is entirely confined to the classes possessed of property". Once the "learned man" of the German Manufacturers' Association has, in the report of The Times of April 17, 1863, thus had Gladstone say "both in form and in content", the same as I had him say in the Inaugural Address, he strikes his swollen breast, brimming with conviction, and blusters:

"Yet despite this Marx has the impudence to write in the Volksstaat of June 1: 'So, on April 16, 1863, Mr. Gladstone declared 'both in form and in content' in the House of Commons, as reported in his own organ, The Times, on April 17, 1863 that 'this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to the classes possessed of property'."

The "learned man" of the German Manufacturers' Association obviously knows exactly what to offer his readership!

In the Volksstaat of June 1, I remarked that the Concordia was trying to make its readers believe I had suppressed in the Inaugural Address Gladstone's phrases about the improvement in the condition of the British working class, though in fact the exact opposite was the case, and I stressed there with great emphasis the glaring contradiction between this declamation and the officially established facts. In its reply of July 4, the manufacturers' paper repeated the same manoeuvre. "Marx quotes The Times to this point," the paper says, "we quote further." In confrontation with the paper, I needed only to quote the disputed passage, but let us look for a moment at the "further".

After pouring forth his panegyric on the increase of Capitalist wealth, Gladstone turns to the working class. He takes good care not to say that it had shared in the "intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power". On the contrary, he goes on, according to The Times: "Now, the augmentation of Capital is of indirect benefit to the labourer, etc." He consoles himself further on with the fact "that while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor". Finally, he asserts that he and his enriched parliamentary friends "have the happiness to know" the opposite of what parliamentary enquiries and statistical data prove to be the fact, viz.,

"that the average condition of the British labourer has improved during the last 20 years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary, and which we may almost pronounce to be unparalleled in the history of any country and of any age".

Before Mr. Gladstone, all his predecessors "had the happiness" to supplement the picture of the augmentation of Capitalist wealth in their budget speeches with self-satisfied phrases about the improvement in the condition of the working class. Yet he gives the lie to them all; for the millennium dates only from the passing of the Free Trade legislation. The correctness or incorrectness of Gladstone's reasons for consolidation and congratulation is, however, a matter of indifference here. We are concerned solely with this: that, from his standpoint, the pretended "extraordinary" improvement in the condition of the working class in no way contradicts the "intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power that is entirely confined to the classes possessed of property". On the contrary. It is the orthodox doctrine of the mouthpieces of Capital -- Mr. Gladstone being one of the best paid -- that the most infallible means for working men to benefit themselves is -- to enrich their exploiters.

The shameless stupidity or stupid shamelessness of the manufacturers' organ culminates in its assurance: "The report in The Times just gives, formally more contracted, what the shorthand report by Hansard gives verbatim." [Marx note: The manufacturers' paper appears actually to believe that the big London newspapers employ no shorthand writers for their parliamentary reports.] Now let us see both reports:

1. I:

From Gladstone's speech of April 16, 1863, printed in "The Times" of April 17, 1863 debates of March 27 to May 28 1863

"That is the state of the case as regards the wealth of this country. I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that was confined to the CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES. This takes no cogniz- ance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described ... is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property. Now the augmentation of Capital is of indirect benefit to the labourer etc. they do not take cognizance of the property (!) of the labouring population, or (!) of the increase of its income. Indirectly, indeed, the mere augmentation of Capital is of the utmost advantage to the labouring class, etc."

2. II:

From Gladstone's speech of April 16, 1863, printed by Hansard, Vol. 170, parliamentary

"Such [...] is the state of the case as regards the general progress of accumulation; but, for one, I must say that I should look with some degree of pain, and with much apprehension, it upon this extraordinary and almost intoxicating growth, if it were my belief that it is confined to THE CLASS OF PERSONS WHO MAY BE DESCRIBED AS IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES. The figures which I have quoted take little or no cognizance of the condition of those who do not pay income tax; or, in other words, sufficiently accurate for general truth (!),

I leave it to the reader himself to compare the stilted, involved, complicated CIRCUMLOCUTION OFFICE [From Ch. Dickens' Little Dorrit -- MECW Ed.] style of the Hansard publication with the report in The Times.

Here it is enough to establish that the words of the Times report: "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... the augmentation I have described ... is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property", are in part garbled by Hansard and in part completely suppressed. Their emphatic "exact wording" escaped no earwitness. For example:

"The Morning Star", April 17, 1863 (Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863).

"I must say, for one, I should look with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to the CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES. THIS GREAT INCREASE OF WEALTH takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. THE AUGMENTATION IS AN AUGMENTATION ENTIRELY CONFINED TO THE CLASSES POSSESSED OF PROPERTY. BUT THAT AUGMENTATION must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, etc."

"The Morning Advertiser", April 17, 1863 (Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863).

"I must say, for one, I should look almost with apprehension and ALARM upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to the CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES. This great increase of wealth takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. THE AUGMENTATION STATED is an augmentation entirely confined to the CLASSES POSSESSED OF PROPERTY. THIS AUGMENTATION must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, etc."

Thus, Gladstone subsequently filched away from the semiofficial Hansard report of his speech the words that he had uttered in the House of Commons on April 16, 1863: "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property." The Concordia did not, therefore, find this in the excerpt provided by their business friend in London, and trumpeted:

"Yet this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech. Marx has added the sentence lyingly, both in form and in content."

It is no surprise that they now weepingly tell me that it is the critical "custom" to quote parliamentary speeches as officially falsified, and not as they were actually delivered. Such a "custom" in fact accords with the "general" Berlin "education", and the limited thinking of the German Manufacturers' Association which is typical of Prussian subjects. Lack of time forces me to end, once and for all, my pleasurable exchange of opinions with the Association, but as a farewell, another nut for its "learned men" to crack. In what article did a man -- and what was his name -- utter to an opponent of a rank at least equal with that of the Concordia, the weighty words: "Asinus manebis in secula seculorum"? ["Thou wilt remain an ass for evermore."]

London, July 28, 1872

Karl Marx

5. No. 7.

THE REJOINDER OF ANONYMOUS

1. CONCORDIA, No. 54, AUGUST 22, 1872

More on the Character of Karl Marx

On August 7, in the Volksstaat, Karl Marx replied to the article "How Karl Marx Defends Himself" in No. 27 of the Concordia. Astonishing is the dogged mendacity with which he clings to the distorted quotation from Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863, astonishing even for someone for whom no means are too base for his subversive plans. In fact this can only be explained by the fear, which must be called forth in the author, of the very embarrassing effect of confessing that this quotation, the bombshell of the Inaugural Address, is false, given the great circulation of the latter.

It will be recalled that in his first defence Marx admitted the shorthand report of Gladstone's speech in Hansard did not contain this quotation. But the reason was: Mr. Gladstone had clumsily excised this compromising passage! Initial proof: Professor Beesly, in an article in The Fortnightly Review had quoted this speech in the same way as the Inaugural Address.

This could lead the reader to believe that Professor Beesly had quoted Gladstone's speech in an essay on some other historical theme than the International. We therefore remarked, firstly, that this article dealt with the history of the International, and was written on the basis of material that Marx himself had provided the author with. And Marx does not now deny this. However, he assures us that the material he provided did not contain a single word referring to the contents of the Inaugural Address, which had been known to Professor Beesly since its publication. However, we never said or insinuated such a thing. And we absolutely believe Mr. Marx's assurance. Had he shown Mr. Beesly The Theory of the Exchanges as the source of his quotation, Beesly would certainly have refrained from reprinting it. Secondly, we replied -- and this is the main rejoinder: it was not Beesly who quoted the passage in question from Gladstone's speech; he only cited it in an analysis of the Inaugural Address. We quoted word for word the relevant sentence from Beesly's article, as can be seen in No. 27 of the Concordia. The fact that Beesly, in his analysis, gave the words "as Mr. Gladstone observed" without quotation marks * is now used by Marx to explain to his readers that Beesly, suddenly interrupting his analysis, said these words on his own behalf!! [Note by Brentano: Additional note on republication: Professor Beesly copied the passage which he quoted from the Inaugural Address exactly as given there. There, however, the inserted clause is naturally without quotation marks.]

Marx sought to find further proof that Gladstone had clumsily excised the words in question from his speech in the fact that The Theory of the Exchanges, a publication which appeared before the Inaugural Address, quoted Gladstone's budget speech word for word as in the Address. We checked with the book, saw that this was correct, but that everything suggests Marx himself took his quotation from this book. The main sign of this was that Capital by Marx, on p.639, especially in Note 103, quotes this speech in the absolutely senseless version given verbatim by The Theory of the Exchanges on p.134. This suggestion that The Theory of the Exchanges was the source of Marx's quotation is further supported by the fact that in the passage in his book Capital where he quotes the Gladstone speech just as The Theory of the Exchanges did on p. 134, he gives other quotations to be found at the same place in that book, and adds glosses like this. How does Mr. Marx reply to this? For a start, that he also added glosses which are not to be found in The Theory of the Exchanges. But neither is this precluded by our remark. Then he states that he specifically named the author of The Theory of the Exchanges as the author of the quotation from Molière. But we did not claim the contrary. Finally, regarding the statement of the LONDON ORPHAN ASYLUM, which Marx quotes on p. 640 of his book just as The Theory of the Exchanges does on p. 135, Marx himself admits that he quoted verbatim from this book, but that he checked the correctness with the original sources. Marx thus testifies himself that part of the glosses which he appends to the quotation from Gladstone's speech come from The Theory of the Exchanges. He thus bears witness to the correctness of the points with which we supported our main argument that he had also taken from The Theory of the Exchanges the quotation from Gladstone's speech. But he has nothing to say in answer to this main argument, in answer to the remark that he, like The Theory of the Exchanges, quotes Gladstone's speech in the same absolutely senseless version.

Thirdly and finally, Marx attempts to prove his claim that Gladstone subsequently falsified his own budget speech in the shorthand report in Hansard by referring to the report of this speech in The Times of April 17, 1863. But this report shows the exact opposite, since The Times and Hansard fully coincide materially. To obscure recognition of this fact by his readers, Marx utilises various methods. The first method, designed simultaneously to awaken amongst the readers of the Volksstaat new admiration for the erudition of their oracle, was a philological lecture. Gladstone explicitly stated, also according to the Times report, insofar as Marx quoted this, that he believed that the intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power of which he had spoken was not confined "TO THE CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES", i.e. the classes finding themselves in pleasant circumstances. Basing himself upon Wakefield, who had written a book entitled The Middle or Uneasy Class, Marx now claimed that Gladstone had said he believed this augmentation was Dot confined to the "really rich", the "really prosperous portion" of the propertied classes; and since we took no notice of this entire argumentation, he now accuses us of suppression. But if we remained silent about this further attempt at falsification, the only reason was that it was, in fact, too manifest. For whatever Wakefield may have meant when he called the middle class THE UNEASY CLASS the whole context of Gladstone's speech, in the Times report too, shows that by the "CLASSES WHO ARE IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES" Gladstone at this point meant those classes which are not part of the working population, since he drew a contrast between them and it.

Marx's second method of obscuring the Times report was simply to suppress, in his German translation of this report, the relative clause which showed that Gladstone had only said that the augmentation of wealth, which was shown by the income tax returns, was confined to the classes of property, since the working classes were not subject to income tax, and that thus nothing about the increase in the prosperity of the working classes could be learned from the income tax returns; not, however, that the working classes in reality had been excluded from the extraordinary augmentation of national wealth. Marx, who, as we just have seen, quite unwarrantably accused the Concordia of suppression, once again quietly suppressed this relative clause, although we had remonstrated with him about his distortion. And even more. We had stated, in accordance with the truth, that the report in The Times just gives, formally more contracted, what the shorthand report by Hansard gives verbatim; but he denies this and dares to print side by side the Times report and that from Hansard, though he naturally once again omits this relative clause. But what does it matter? The readers of the Volksstaat, with whom he is concerned, cannot check up on him!

Thirdly and finally, Marx attempted to conceal the agreement between the Times report and the Hansard report by failing to quote those sentences in which, according to The Times too, Gladstone directly and explicitly testified to the elevation of the British working class. We made a remark about this, and quoted in full the relevant passage of the Times report. Despite this, Marx lies to his readers that we had wanted to give the impression that we were quoting The Times according to his translation! But against this, he naturally suppresses our proof (in No. 28) that the glaring contradiction, according to Marx, between Gladstone's claim about the improvement in the condition of the British working class and the officially established facts, does not exist in reality; instead he repeats once again this accusation.

Apart from this, Marx, in his reply in the Volksstaat of August 7, produces two further witnesses to the correctness of his reading of Gladstone's budget speech: The Morning Star and The Morning Advertiser of April 17, 1863. But we do not need to check whether Marx has quoted the two papers without fresh falsification. [Note by Brentano: Additional note on republication: Here too Marx omits the same sentences which he suppressed in his reproduction of the Times report. See the two reports at the beginning.] For these papers, even as he quotes them, speak for us. After Gladstone had said, according to both papers, that he did not believe this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is confined to the classes which find themselves in pleasant circumstances, he continued: "This great increase of wealth takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation which I have described is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property." The context and the use of the expression "take cognizance" show clearly that this increase and the augmentation of the increase cited, and the citing, are intended to indicate those discernible in the income tax returns.

But the introduction of these new alleged witnesses is only an expression of the faked thoroughness, intended to perpetuate the faith of Volksstaat readers in their oracle. Marx's article in the Volksstaat of August 7 is a model of this, and worthy of perusal by our readers in person. We need only quote one more example of this, in order to deprive Mr. Marx of the argument that we wished to conceal from our readers that he had corrected us on a point of minor import. We had stated that in England persons with an income under 150 pounds sterling paid no income tax. Mr. Marx taunts us that we do not know this tax only ceases on incomes under 100 pounds sterling. In fact the law of 1842 left all incomes under 150 pounds sterling quite free of tax, but in 1853 the tax was extended downwards to 100 pounds sterling, although the newly included incomes were treated more lightly, since they were subjected to a lower rate of tax than those of 150 pounds sterling and above. In 1863 the favored sector was extended to 200 pounds sterling exclusive upwards, and the tax reduction granted in the manner that for every income from that figure down to 100 pounds sterling inclusive, 60 pounds sterling could be subtracted as tax-free.

Mr. Marx closes his article by telling us that lack of time forces him to end, once and for all, his pleasurable exchange of opinions with us. We understand that Mr. Marx welcomes the opportunity of avoiding somebody who uncovers his forgeries. When Mr. Marx finally ends his article by breaking into abuse, we can assure him that his opponents could desire nothing more than the confession of guilt which lies herein. Abuse is the weapon of those whose other means of defence have run out.

12. III

SEDLEY TAYLOR AND ELEANOR MARX

1. No. 8.

ATTACK BY S. TAYLOR

1. THE TIMES, NOVEMBER 29, 1885

To the Editor of "The Times"

Sir, -- I ask leave to point out in The Times that the Origin of the misleading quotation from Mr. Gladstone's Budget speech of April 16, 1863, which so eminent a publicist as Professor Émile de Laveleye a has been led to reproduce through reliance on German sources, and with respect to which he inserts a correction in The Times of this day, is to be found as far back as 1864 in an address issued by the council of the famous International Working Men's Association.

What appears extremely singular is that it was reserved for Professor Brentano (then of the University of Breslau, now of that of Strassburg) to expose, eight years later in a German newspaper, the bad faith which had manifestly dictated the citation made from Mr. Gladstone's speech in the address.

Herr Karl Marx, who as the acknowledged author of the address attempted to defend the citation, had the hardihood, in the deadly shifts to which Brentano's masterly conduct of the attack speedily reduced him, to assert Mr. Gladstone had "manipulated" (zurechtgestümpert) the report of his speech in The Times of April 17, 1863, before it appeared in "Hansard", in order "to obliterate" (wegzupfuschen) a passage which "was certainly compromising for an English Chancellor of the Exchequer". On Brentano's showing, by a detailed comparison of texts, that the reports of The Times and of "Hansard" agreed in utterly excluding the meaning which craftily-isolated quotation had put upon Mr. Gladstone's words, Marx withdrew from further' controversy under the plea of "want of time"!

The whole of the Brentano-Marx correspondence is eminently worthy of being unearthed from the files of newspapers under which it lies buried, and republished in an English form, as it throws upon the latter disputant's standard of literary honesty a light which can be ill spared at a time when his principal work is presented to us as nothing less than a fresh gospel of social renovation.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

Sedley Taylor

Trinity College, Cambridge,

November 26th [1883]

This letter appeared in The Times on November 29, 1883. On November 30, Eleanor, Marx's junior daughter, sent her reply to The Times. Her letter did not appear. She again wrote in vain to the editor. Then she addressed herself t9 the Daily News, but once more without success. Then she published both Mr. Sedley Taylor's accusation and her reply in the February 1884 issue of the socialist monthly To-Day. We publish her reply below.

2. No. 9.

ELEANOR MARX'S REPLY

1. TO-DAY, FEBRUARY 1884

To the Editor of "The Times"

Sir, -- In The Times of November 29th Mr. Sedley Taylor refers to a certain quotation of a speech by Mr. Gladstone,

"to be found as far back as 1864, in an address issued by the council of the famous International Working Men's Association".

He continues: (I here quote Mr. Taylor's letter from "What appears" to "want of time").

The facts are briefly these. The quotation referred to consists of a few sentences from Mr. Gladstone's Budget speech of April 16th, 1863. After describing the immense increase of wealth that took place in this country between 1853 and 1861 Mr. Gladstone is made to say:

"This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property."

An anonymous writer, who turns out to be Professor Brentano, published in a German paper, Concordia, of the 7th March, 1872 a reply in which it was stated:

"This sentence does not exist in Mr. Gladstone's speech, Marx has added it lyingly, both as to form and contents" (formel und materiel hinzugelogen).

This was the only point at issue between my father and his anonymous opponent.

In his replies in the Leipzig Volksstaat, June 1st and August 7th, 1872, Dr. Marx quotes the reports of Mr. Gladstone's speech as follows:

"The Times, April 17th:

"The augmentation I have described, and which is founded, I think, on accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property.

Morning Star 17th April:

"This augmentation is an augmentation confined entirely to the classes possessed of property,

Morning Advertiser, April 17th:

"The augmentation stated is altogether limited to classes possessed of property.

The anonymous Brentano, in the "deadly shifts to which his own masterly conduct of the attack had reduced him", now took refuge under the assertion usual in such circumstances, that if the quotation was not a forgery it was, at all events, "misleading", in "bad faith", "craftily isolated", and so forth. I am afraid you would not allow me space to reply to this accusation of Herr Brentano, repeated now, after eleven years, by Mr. Taylor. Perhaps it will not be required, as Mr. Taylor says:

"The whole of this Brentano-Marx correspondence is eminently worthy of being unearthed from the file of newspapers in which it lies buried and republished in an English form."

I quite agree with this. The memory of my father could only gain by it. As to the discrepancies between the newspaper reports of the speech in question and the report in "Hansard" I must leave this to be settled by those most interested in it.

Out of thousands and thousands of quotations to be found in my father's writings this is the only one the correctness of which has ever been disputed. The fact that this single and not very lucky instance is brought up again and again by the professorial economists is very characteristic. In the words of Mr. Taylor,

"it throws upon the latter disputant's" (Dr. Marx) "standard of literary honesty a light which can ill be spared at a time when his principal work is presented to us as nothing less than a fresh gospel of social renovation".

I am, Sir, yours faithfully,

Eleanor Marx

London, November 30, 1883

3. No. 10.

SEDLEY TAYLOR'S RETORT

1. TO-DAY, MARCH 1884

To the Editors of "To-Day"

Gentlemen,

No one can regret more than I do that Miss Marx should have been refused the public hearing to which she was so manifestly entitled. I am, however, far from thinking with her that the question whether a particular sentence did, or did not, occur in Mr. Gladstone's speech "was the only point at issue between" Dr. Marx and Professor Brentano. I regard that question as having been of very subordinate importance compared to the issue whether the quotation in dispute was made with the intention of conveying, or of perverting, Mr. Gladstone's meaning.

It would obviously be impossible to discuss in this letter the contents of the voluminous Brentano-Marx controversy without making an inadmissible demand on your space. As, however, Miss Marx has in your columns characterised as a "calumny" and "libel" an opinion publicly expressed by me, [Note by Engels: In the covering letter to the Editors of To-Day, not published here.] I feel bound to ask your insertion, side by side, of the two following extracts, which will enable your readers to judge for themselves whether Dr. Marx has quoted fairly or unfairly from the Budget Speech of 1863 in his great work, "Das Kapital". My reason for using the Times report in preference to that of Hansard will be obvious to readers of Dr. Marx' letters in his correspondence with Brentano.

Times, April 17, 1863

"In ten years, from 1842 to 1852 inclusive, the taxable income of the country, as nearly as we can make out, increased by 6 per cent.; but in eight years, from 1853 to 1861, the income of the country again increased from the basis taken by 20 per cent. That is a fact so strange as to be almost incredible....

"I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was confined to the classes who are in easy circumstances. This takes no cognisance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described, and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes possessed of property. Now, the augmentation of Capital is of indirect benefit to the labourer, because it cheapens the commodity which in the business of production comes into direct competition with labour. But we have this profound, and I must say, inestimable consolation, that, while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. Whether the extremes of poverty are less extreme than they were I do not presume to say, but the average condition of the British labourer, we have the happiness to know, has improved during the last 20 years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary, and which we may almost pronounce to be unexampled in the history of any country and of any age."

Capital, 2nd edition, 1872 page 678, note 103

"From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent...

"In the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it had increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible...

"...This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power...

"...entirely confined to classes of property... must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption...

"...while the rich have been growing richer the poor have been growing less poor! At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less I do not presume to say."

Mr. Gladstone, in House of Commons, 16th April, 1863

I invite especial attention to the hearing on Mr. Gladstone's meaning of the passages in the Times report which I have thrown into italics. The sentence, "I must say ... easy circumstances," conveys the speaker's belief that the intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power previously described was not confined to those in easy circumstances. There is, it is true, a verbal contrariety with the later sentence, "The augmentation ... property," but the intervening words, "This takes no cognisance... population," unmistakably show what Mr. Gladstone meant, viz., that the figures which he had given, being based on the income-tax returns, included only incomes above the exemption limit, [Note by Taylor: This stood at £150 from 1842 to 1853, and was then lowered to £100.] and therefore afforded no indication to what extent the total earnings of the labouring population had increased during the period under consideration. The closing passage, from "but the average" to the end, announces in the most emphatic language that, on evidence independent of that obtained from the income-tax returns, Mr. Gladstone recognised as indubitable an extraordinary and almost unexampled improvement in the average condition of the British labourer.

Now, with what object were these essential passages almost wholly struck out in the process by which the newspaper report was reduced to the remarkable form in which it appears in Dr. Marx' work? Clearly, I think, in order that the arbitrarily-constructed mosaic, pieced together out of such of Mr. Gladstone's words as were allowed to remain, might be understood as asserting that the earnings of the labouring population had made but insignificant progress, while the incomes of the possessing classes had increased enormously -- a view which the omitted passages explicitly repudiate in favour of a very different opinion.

I must not pass over unnoticed the fact that the German translation of this docked citation in the text of "Das Kapital" is immediately followed there by the expression of Dr. Marx' contemptuous astonishment at the "lame anti-climax" presented by the sentence made to figure as the conclusion of Mr. Gladstone's paragraph, when compared with his previous description of the growth of wealth among the possessing classes.

I am, Gentlemen, yours truly,

Sedley Taylor

Trinity College, Cambridge

February 8th, 1884

4. No. 11.

ELEANOR MARX'S SECOND REPLY

1. TO-DAY, MARCH 1884

To the Editors of "To-Day"

Gentlemen,

Mr. Sedley Taylor disputes my statement that, when the anonymous slanderer fell foul of Dr. Marx, the only point at issue was whether Mr. Gladstone had used certain words or not. According to him, the real question was,

"whether the quotation in dispute was made with the intention of conveying or of perverting Mr. Gladstone's meaning".

I have before me the Concordia article (No. 10, 7th March, 1872), "How Karl Marx Quotes". Here the anonymous author first quotes the "Inaugural Address" of the International; then the passage of Mr. Gladstone's speech, in full, from Hansard; then he condenses the passage in his own way, and to his own satisfaction; and lastly, he concludes,

"Marx takes advantage of this to make Gladstone say, 'This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes possessed of property. This sentence, however, is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech. The very contrary is said in it. Marx has lyingly added this sentence, both as to form and contents."

That is the charge, and the only charge, made against Dr. Marx. He is indeed accused of perverting Mr. Gladstone's meaning by "lyingly adding" a whole sentence. Not a word about "misleading", or "craftily isolated" quotations. The question simply is, "whether a particular sentence did, or did not, occur in Mr. Gladstone's speech".

Of two things, one. Either Mr. Taylor has read Brentano's attacks and my father's replies, and then his assertion is in direct contradiction of what he cannot help knowing to be the truth. Or else he has not. And then? Here is a man who dates his letters from Trinity College, Cambridge, who goes out of his way to assail my dead father's literary honesty in a way which must needs turn out to be a "calumny" unless he proves his case; who makes this charge upon the strength of a literary controversy dating as far back as 1872, between an anonymous writer (whom Mr. Taylor now asserts to be Professor Brentano) and my father; who describes in glowing terms the "masterly conduct" in which Saint George Brentano led his attack, and the "deadly shifts" to which he speedily reduced the dragon Marx; who can give us all particulars of the crushing results obtained by the said St. George "by a detailed comparison of texts"; and who after all, puts me into this delicate position that I am in charity bound to assume that he has never read a line of what he is speaking about.

Had Mr. Taylor seen the "masterly" articles of his anonymous friend, he would have found therein the following:

"Now we ask; does anyone tell a lie only then when he himself invents an untruth, or does he not tell a lie quite as much when. he repeats it contrary to what he knows, or is bound to know better?"

Thus saith the "masterly" Brentano, as virtuous as he is anonymous, in his rejoinder to my father's first reply (Concordia, No. 27, 4th July, 1872, p. 210). And on the same page he still maintains against all comers:

"According to the Times report, too, Mr. Gladstone said he believed this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power not to be confined to classes of property."

If Brentano thus appears utterly ignorant of what was the real point at issue, is Mr. Sedley Taylor better off? In his letter to The Times it was a quotation made in the "Inaugural Address" of the International. In his letter to To-Day it is a quotation in "Das Kapital". The ground is shifted again, but I need not object. Mr. Taylor now gives us the Gladstonian passage as quoted on pages 678 and 679 of "Das Kapital", side by side with the same passage as reported -- not by Hansard, but by The Times.

"My reason for using the Times report instead of that of Hansard, will be obvious to readers of Dr. Marx's letters and his correspondence with Brentano."

Mr. Taylor, as we have seen, is not of these "readers". His reason for his proceeding may therefore be obvious to others, but upon his own showing at least, it can hardly be so to himself.

Anyhow, from Hansard the Infallible we are brought down to that very report, for using which the anonymous Brentano (Concordia, same page, 210), assails my father as quoting "necessarily bungling (stümperhafte) newspaper reports". At any rate, Mr. Taylor's "reason" must be very "obvious" to his friend Brentano.

To me that reason is obvious indeed. The words which my father was accused of having lyingly added ("an augmentation", etc.), these words are contained in The Times as well as in the other dailies' reports, while in Hansard they are not only "manipulated", but entirely "obliterated". Marx established this fact. Mr. Taylor, in his letter to The Times, still awfully shocked at such unpardonable "hardihood", is now himself compelled to drop the impeachable Hansard, and to take refuge under what Brentano calls the "necessarily bungling" report of The Times.

Now for the quotation itself. Mr. Taylor invites especial attention to two passages thrown by him into italics. In the first he owns:

"there is, it is true, a verbal contrariety with the latter sentence'. the augmentation property; but the intervening words: this takes ... population, unmistakeably show what Mr. Gladstone meant," etc., etc.

Here we are plainly on theological ground. It is the well-known style of orthodox interpretation of the Bible. The passage, it is true, is in itself contradictory, but if interpreted according to the true faith of a believer, you will find that it will bear out a meaning not in contradiction with that true faith. If Mr. Taylor interprets Mr. Gladstone as Mr. Gladstone interprets the Bible, he must not expect any but the orthodox to follow him.

Now Mr. Gladstone on that particular occasion, either did speak English or he did not. If he did not, no manner of quotation or interpretation will avail. If he did, he said that he should be very sorry if that intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power was confined to classes in easy circumstances, but that it was confined entirely to classes of property. And that is what Marx quoted.

The second passage is one of those stock phrases which are repeated, with slight variations, in every British budget speech, seasons of bad trade alone excepted. What Marx thought of it, and of the whole speech is shown in the following extract from his second reply to his anonymous slanderer;

"Gladstone, having poured forth his panegyric on the increase of Capitalist wealth, turns towards the working class. He takes good care not to say that they had shared in the intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power. On the contrary, he continues (according to The Times): 'Now, the augmentation of Capital is of indirect benefit to the labourers,' etc. He consoles himself with the fact that while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. He asserts, finally, he and his enriched parliamentary friends 'have the happiness to know' the contrary of what official enquiries and statistical dates prove to be the fact, viz.,

"'that the average condition of the British labourer has improved during the last 20 years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary, and which we may almost pronounce to be unexampled in the history of any country and of any age.

"Before Mr. Gladstone, all his predecessors 'had the happiness' to complete in their budget speeches the picture of the augmentation of Capitalist wealth by self-complacent phrases about the improvement in the condition of the working class. Yet he gives the lie to them all; for the millennium dates only from the passing of the Free Trade legislation. But the correctness or incorrectness of Gladstone's reasons for consolation and congratulation is a matter of indifference here. What alone concerns us is this, that from his stand-point the pretended 'extraordinary' improvement in the condition of the working-class is not at all in contradiction with the augmentation of wealth and power which is entirely confined to classes possessed of property. It is the orthodox doctrine of the mouth-pieces of Capital -- one of the best paid of whom is Gladstone -- that the most infallible means for working men to benefit themselves is -- to enrich their exploiters." (Volksstaat, No. 63, August 7, 1872).

Moreover, to please Mr. Taylor, the said passage of Mr. Gladstone's speech is quoted in full in the Inaugural Address, page 5, immediately before the quotation in dispute. And what else but this address did Mr. Taylor originally impute? Is it as impossible to get a reference to original sources out of him, as it was to get reasons out of Dogberry?

"The continuous crying contradictions in Gladstone's budget speeches" form the subject of Note 105 on the same page (679) of "Das Kapital" to which Mr. Taylor refers us. Very likely indeed, that Marx should have taken the trouble to suppress "in bad faith" one of the contradictions! Quite the contrary. He has not suppressed anything worth quoting, neither has he "lyingly" added anything. But he has restored, rescued from oblivion, a particular sentence of one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches, a sentence which had indubitably been pronounced, but which somehow or other had found its way -- out of Hansard.

Eleanor Marx

13. IV. ENGELS AND BRENTANO

1. No. 12.

FROM ENGELS' PREFACE TO THE FOURTH GERMAN EDITION OF MARX'S

1. Capital, VOLUME ONE

Meanwhile a complete revision of the numerous quotations had been made necessary by the publication of the English edition. For this edition Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, undertook to compare all the quotations with their originals, so that those taken from English sources, which constitute the vast majority, are given there not as retranslations from German but in the original English form. In preparing the fourth edition it was therefore incumbent upon me to consult this text. The comparison revealed various small inaccuracies. Page numbers wrongly indicated, due partly to mistakes in copying from notebooks, and partly to the accumulated misprints of three editions; misplaced quotation or omission marks, which cannot be avoided when a mass of quotations is copied from notebook extracts; here and there some rather unhappy translation of a word; particular passages quoted from the old Paris notebooks of 1843-45, when Marx did not know English and was reading English economists in French translations, so that the double translation yielded a slightly different shade of meaning, e.g., in the case of Steuart, Ure, etc., where the English text had now to be used -- and other similar instances of trifling inaccuracy or negligence. But anyone who compares the fourth edition with the previous ones can convince himself that all this laborious process of emendation has not produced the smallest change in the book worth speaking of. There was only one quotation which could not be traced -- the one from Richard Jones (4th edition, p. S62, Note 47). Marx probably slipped up when writing down the title of the book. All the other quotations retain their cogency in full, or have enhanced it due to their present exact form.

Here, however, I am obliged to revert to an old story.

I know of only one case in which the accuracy of a quotation given by Marx has been called in question. But as the issue dragged beyond his lifetime I cannot well ignore it here.

On March 7, 1872, there appeared in the Berlin Concordia, organ of the German Manufacturers' Association, an anonymous article entitled: "How Karl Marx Quotes." It was here asserted, with an effervescence of moral indignation and unparliamentary language, that the quotation from Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863 (in the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association. 1864, and repeated in Capital, Vol. I, p.617, 4th edition; p. 671, 3rd edition),c had been falsified; that not a single word of the sentence: "this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... is entirely confined to classes of property" was to be found in the (semi-official) shorthand report in Hansard. "Yet this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech. It says quite the opposite." (In bold type): "Marx has added the sentence lyingly, both in form and in content!"

Marx, to whom the number of Concordia was sent the following May, answered Anonymous in the Volksstaat of June 15. As he could not recall which newspaper report he had used for the quotation, he limited himself to citing, first the equivalent quotation from two English publications, and then the report in The Times, according to which Gladstone says:

"That is the state of the case as regards the wealth of this country. I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to classes who are in easy circumstances. This takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property."

Thus Gladstone says here that he would be sorry if it were so, but it is so: this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property. And as to the semi-official Hansard, Marx goes on to say: "In its edition, here botchily corrected, Mr. Gladstone was bright enough clumsily to excise the passage that would be, after all, compromising on the lips of an English Chancellor of the Exchequer. This is, incidentally, traditional English parliamentary practice, and by no means the invention of little Lasker versus Bebel."

Anonymous gets angrier and angrier. In his answer in the Concordia, July 4, he sweeps aside second-hand sources and demurely suggests that it is the "custom" to quote parliamentary speeches from the shorthand report; adding, however, that the Times report (which includes the "lyingly added" sentence) and the Hansard report (which omits it) "fully coincide materially", while the Times report likewise contains "the direct opposite of that notorious passage in the Inaugural Address". This fellow carefully conceals the fact that the Times report explicitly includes that self-same "notorious passage , alongside of its alleged "opposite". Despite all this, however, Anonymous feels that he is stuck fast and that only some new dodge can save him. Thus, whilst his article bristles, as we have just shown, with "impudent mendacity" and is interlarded with such edifying terms of abuse as "bad faith", "dishonesty", "lying statement", "that lying quotation", "impudent mendacity", "a quotation completely forged", "this forgery", "simply nefarious", etc., he finds it necessary to divert the issue to another domain and therefore promises "to explain in a second article the importance which we" (the non-"mendacious" Anonymous) "attach to the content of Gladstone's words". As if his particular opinion, of no decisive value as it is, had anything whatever to do with the matter. This second article was printed in the Concordia on July 11.

Marx replied again in the Volksstaat of August 7 now giving also the reports of the passage in question from The Morning Star and The Morning Advertiser of April 17, 1863. According to both reports Gladstone said that he would look with apprehension, etc., upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if he believed it to be confined to CLASSES IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES. But this augmentation was in fact ENTIRELY CONFINED TO CLASSES POSSESSED OF PROPERTY. So these reports too reproduced word for word the sentence alleged to have been "lyingly added". Marx further established once more, by a comparison of the Times and the Hansard texts, that this sentence, which three newspaper reports of identical content, appearing independently of one another the next morning, proved to have been really uttered, was missing from the Hansard report, revised according to the familiar "custom", and that Gladstone, to use Marx's words, "had subsequently filched it away". In conclusion Marx stated that he had no time for further intercourse with Anonymous. The latter also seems to have had enough, at any rate Marx received no further issues of Concordia.

With this the matter appeared to be dead and buried. True, once or twice later on there reached us, from persons in touch with the University of Cambridge, mysterious rumours of an unspeakable literary crime which Marx was supposed to have committed in Capital; but despite all investigation nothing more definite could be learned. Then, on November 29, 1883, eight months after Marx's death, there appeared in The Times a letter dated from Trinity College, Cambridge, and signed Sedley Taylor, in which this little man, who dabbles in the mildest sort of co-operative affairs, seizing upon some chance pretext or other, at last enlightened us, not only concerning those vague Cambridge rumours, but also Anonymous in the Concordia.

"What appears extremely singular," says the little man from Trinity College, "is that it was reserved for Professor Brentano (then of the University of Breslau, now of that of Strassburg) to expose ... the bad faith which had manifestly dictated the citation made from Mr. Gladstone's speech in the '(Inaugural)' Address. Herr Karl Marx, who ... attempted to defend the citation, had the hardihood, in the DEADLY SHIFTS to which Brentano's masterly conduct of the attack speedily reduced him, to assert that Mr. Gladstone had 'manipulated' the report of his speech in The Times of April 17, 1863, before it appeared in Hansard, in order to 'obliterate' a passage which 'was certainly compromising for an English Chancellor of the Exchequer'. On Brentano's showing, by a detailed comparison of texts, that the reports of The Times and of Hansard agreed in utterly excluding the meaning which craftily-isolated quotation had put upon Mr. Gladstone's words, Marx withdrew from further controversy under the plea of 'want of time!'"

So that was at the bottom of the whole business! And thus was the anonymous campaign of Mr. Brentano in the Concordia gloriously reflected in the productively co-operating imagination of Cambridge. Thus he stood, sword in hand, and thus he battled, in his "masterly conduct of the attack", this St. George of the German Manufacturers' Association, whilst the infernal dragon Marx, "in deadly shifts", "speedily" breathed his last at his feet.

All this Ariostian battle-scene, however, only serves to conceal the dodges of our St. George. Here there is no longer talk of "lying addition" or "forgery", but of "CRAFTILY ISOLATED QUOTATION". The whole issue was shifted, and St. George and his Cambridge squire very well knew why.

Eleanor Marx replied in the monthly journal To-Day (February 1884) a, as The Times refused to publish her letter. She once more focused the debate on the sole question at issue: had Marx "lyingly added" that sentence or not? To this Mr. Sedley Taylor answered that

"the question whether a particular sentence did or did not occur In Mr. Gladstone's speech" had been, in his opinion, "of very subordinate importance" in the Brentano-Marx controversy, "compared to the issue whether the quotation in dispute was made with the intention of conveying, or of perverting, Mr. Gladstone's meaning".

He then admits that the Times report contains "a verbal contrariety"; but, if the context is rightly interpreted, i.e., in the Gladstonian Liberal sense, it shows what Mr. Gladstone meant to say. (To-Day, March 1884) The most comic point here is that our little Cambridge man now insists upon quoting the speech not from Hansard, as, according to the anonymous Brentano, it is "customary" to do, but from the Times report, which the same Brentano had characterised as "necessarily bungling". Naturally so, for in Hansard the vexatious sentence is missing.

Eleanor Marx had no difficulty (in the same issue of To-Day) in dissolving all this argumentation into thin air. Either Mr. Taylor had read the controversy of 1872 in which case he was now making not only "lying additions" but also "lying suppressions"; or he had not read it and ought to remain silent. In either case it was certain that he did not dare to maintain for a moment the accusation of his friend Brentano that Marx had made a "lying" addition. On the contrary, Marx, it now seems, had not lyingly added hut suppressed an important sentence. But this same sentence is quoted on page 5 of the Inaugural Address, a few lines before the alleged "lying addition". And as to the "contrariety" in Gladstone's speech, is it not Marx himself, who in Capital, p. 618 (3rd edition, p. 672), Note 105 a refers to "the continuous crying contradictions in Gladstone's budget speeches of 1863 and 1864"? Only he does not presume à la Mr. Sedley Taylor to resolve them into complacent Liberal sentiments. Eleanor Marx, in concluding her reply, finally sums up as follows:

"Marx has not suppressed anything worth quoting, neither has he 'lyingly' added anything. But he has restored, rescued from oblivion, a particular sentence of one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches, a sentence which had indubitably been pronounced, but which somehow or other had found its way -- out of Hansard."

With that Mr. Sedley Taylor too had had enough, and the result of this whole professorial cobweb, spun out over two decades and two great countries, is that nobody has since dared to cast any other aspersion upon Marx's literary honesty; whilst Mr. Sedley Taylor, no doubt, will hereafter put as little confidence in the literary war bulletins of Mr. Brentano as Mr. Brentano will in the papal infallibility of Hansard.

London, June 25, 1890

Frederick Engels

2. No. 13.

BRENTANO'S REPLY

1. "My Polemic with Karl Marx", Berlin, 1890, pp. 3-5

On September 28, 1864, a public meeting was held in St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London, at which Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles and Italians were represented. Karl Marx submitted to this meeting the Provisional Rules of an international workers' organisation which was to be founded, together with the Inaugural Address he had drafted for the same. Both were adopted unanimously, and the Inaugural Address went round the world. It contained a quotation from Gladstone's budget speech of April 16, 1863, which attracted more attention than all the other statements contained therein:

"Dazzled by the 'Progress of the Nation' statistics dancing before his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy: 'From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent; in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible!... This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,' adds Mr. Gladstone, 'is entirely confined to classes of property.'"

In the winter of 1871-72, while working on the second volume of my Die Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart, I was obliged to investigate (cf. II, 241) to what extent the oft-heard objection -- that a wage increase diminishes the future demand for labour -- accords with the facts. In the previous decades this objection had repeatedly been used against the English trade associations every time they called for wage increases. Here I recalled this quotation from Gladstone's budget speech. However, it appeared to me to be unwise to quote as a source the Address of the International, as many others had, and the relevant passage in Marx's Capital, Vol 1,1867, p.639. I consulted the shorthand report of Gladstone's budget speech and found that this in fact showed that the wage increases in the period 1842-1861 had not limited the increase in the income of the possessing classes in any way which negatively affected their demand for labour; but that, on the contrary Gladstone had stated in direct opposition to Karl Marx's claim: "The figures which I have quoted take little or no cognizance of the condition of those who do not pay income tax ... of the property of the lahouring population, or of the increase of its income... But if we look to the average condition of the British labourer, whether peasant, or miner, or operative, or artisan, we know from varied and indubitable evidence that during the last twenty years such an addition has been made to his means of subsistence as we may almost pronounce to be without examp]e in the history of any country and of any age.

In view of the great importance of the Gladstone's quotation for the Social Democratic claim that in the framework of the existing state and social order the rich would necessarily become ever richer and the poor ever poorer, I drew the attention of the editors of the Concordia, Zeitschrift für die Arbeiterfrage, at that time appearing in Berlin, to the forgery which had been committed here. They asked me to write an article on the subject, which was published in the Concordia of March 7, 1872. The article was not signed by me; this was done, on the one hand, at the request of the editors in the interests of the reputation of their paper, and, on the other hand, I had all the less objection, since following earlier literary controversies pursued by Marx it was to be expected that this time too he would heap personal insults upon his adversary, and that for this reason it could only be amusing to leave him in the dark as to the identity of his adversary.

Three months later Marx replied in the Volksstaat. In the polemic which then developed it became clear that Marx had not undertaken the forgery himself, but had taken the forged quotation from a diatribe which had been published anonymously in 1864. This work, entitled The Theory of the Exchanges. The Bank Charter Act of 1844. The abuse of the metallic principle to depreciation. Parliament mirrored in Debate, supplemental to 'The Stock Exchange and the Repeal of Sir J. Barnard's Act', London: T. Cautley Newby, 80, Welbeck Street, 1864, is the work of a perverse Thersites and consists largely of garbled quotations from writings and speeches on national economy, bestrewn with Latin, English and French verses and other comments, aimed at derision. Being of such a nature, this book has understandably remained in thorough obscurity.

Had Marx simply admitted that he had been misled by this book, and from then on reproduced the quotation correctly, one might have been surprised that he had relied upon such a source, hut the mistake would at least have been rectified. But for him there was no question of this. And given the wide circulation which had been attained by the Inaugural Address, the loss of this show-piece as the result of this correction, would have been very embarrassing for the agitation. One of the main agitational methods of Social Democracy is that its representatives proclaim themselves the sole proprietors of real science; and as the Party Congress in Halle 148 showed, they prefer to accuse themselves of having utilised the iron law of wages in deliberate untruthfulness simply as a means of agitation, rather than confess that they have been shown to be in error. Instead of withdr;iwing, Marx therefore attempted to prove that Gladstone had subsequently tinkered with the shorthand report of his budget speech; the loutishnesses of his Scurrilous polemics was now directed against the supposed manufacturer, who had attempted to tell him what to do with the help of an English business partner; when it was shown that The Times too, in its issue which appeared on the morning following the night in which Gladstone had made his speech, carried this speech in a sense according with the shorthand report, he acted, as the editors of the Concordia wrote: "like the cuttlefish, which dims the water with a dark fluid, in order to make pursuit by its enemy more difficult, i.e. he tries as hard as he can to hide the subject of controversy by clinging to completely inconsequential secondary itatters; and finally he saves himself with the explanation that for 'lack of time' he cannot go into the matter any further." And for all time he failed to reply to my analysis of his rejoinder published in the Concordia on August 22, 1872.

The fact that I was the author of the articles in the Concordia of March 7, July 4 and 11, and August 22, 1872 was known to a ntimber of people, and in the second edition of Mehring's Geschichte der Sozialdemokratie, which was published while Marx was still alive, I was publicly named as such. Having his attention thus drawn to it, Mr. Sedley Taylor of Trinity College, Cambridge studied the polemic, and wrote a letter about it to The Times. This brought upon the scene Miss Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, who had died in the meantime, and in the socialist monthly To-Day of March 1884 she not only defended her father's loyalty, but closed with the remark that her father had restored and rescued from oblivion a particular sentence from one of Gladstone's speeches, a sentence which had indubitably been pronounced, but which somehow or other had found its way out of the shorthand report in Hansard.

Even at that time I considered replying to this obstinate clinging to the false quotation with the verbatim publication of the entire polemic. But editors often have their own judgement; the specialist journal which I regarded as suitable above all others refused to publish, on the grounds that the dispute lacked general interest. Engels was obviously of a different opinion. In the Preface to the fourth edition of the first volume of Capital, which he undertook, he returned to the polemic, hut reported upon it in such a manner that the dishonesty with which it had been conducted by Marx was, understandablv not made clear in addition he left unchanged the passage in Capital I, 4th edition, p. 617, in which Marx had Gladstone say the opposite of what he really said and Lven more while Marx in his first edition simply referred to "Gladstone in H.o.C. April 16 1863", the 4th edition added "The Morning Star, April 17 1863 as though the report in this newspaper really contained the quotation as given by Marx. But the report in The Morning Star too contains all those sentences omitted by The Theory of the Exchanges and subsequently by Marx, sentences which show that where Gladstone refers in his budget speech to income tax revenue, he is onlv contrasting the incomes of those who pay this tax with the incomes of those who, because of lower incomes, are free of this tax; that he perceives from the income tax lists an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, and remarks at the same time that the increase in income shown by these lists is confined to those in easy circumstances -- quite naturally, since the incomes of the rest are not shown in these lists; but that he does not believe this augmentation is confined to these classes, since it is known from other sources that at the same time the condition of the British labourer has improved to a degree unexampled in any country and any age...

(The remainder has nothing to do with the charge and is simply a "Contribution to the Question" etc. -- F. Engels.)

3. No. 14.

FROM THE APPENDICES TO BRENTANO'S REPLY

a) From [H. Roy,] The Theory of the Exchanges, London, 1864, p. 134.

"From 1842 to 1852, the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent ... in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it had increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! My honourable friend says, it is owing to Australian gold. I am sorry to see that he is lost in the depths of heresy upon the subject of gold. This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property, but must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption -- while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor! at any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are lest, I do not presume to say." *

"Voilà l'homme en effet. II va du blanc au noir.

Il condamne au matin ses sentiments du soir.

Importun à tout autre, à lui meme incommode,

Il change a' tous moments d'esprit comme de mode."

"The average condition of the British labourer hat improved during the last twenty years in a degree we know to be extraordinary and unexampled in the history of any country or any age, a matter of the greatest thankfulness, because, etc hardly have earnings given a sufficiency of prime necessaries,..."

Noteworthy for the connection between The Theory of the Exchanges, and Marx's remarks in Capital, I, 1st edition, p. 639 is also the following. Having advanced here the details, quoted from The Theory of the Exchanges, given by the LONDON ORPHAN ASYLUM, against Gladstone's sentence "WHETHER THE EXTREMES OF POVERTY ARE LESS EXTREME THAN THEY WERE, I DO NOT PRESUME TO SAY", Marx turns against Gladstone's budget speech of April 7, 1864; The Theory of the Exchanges has an APPENDIX, in which, as a supplement to the pages just printed here, there is also a gloss on the budget of 1864. The style in which this is done is the same as that which is familiar enough from the foregoing. This excursus contains the following passage (p. 234):

"But the Chancellor is eloquent upon 'poverty'... 'Think of those who are on the border of that region...', upon 'wages ... in others it is true not increased... human life is, but, in nine cases out of ten, a struggle for existence'."

Now compare with this Marx, 1, 1st ed., p.640, 4th ed., p. 618. Here too again, instead of the reproduction of the actual budget speech verbatim, [we find the same mosaic of sentences torn from their context as in The Theory of the Exchanges. And here too it is not this source which is referred to, but simply to Gladstone, H.o.C., April 7, 1864. And then the text continues: "The continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's budget speeches of 1863 and 1864 were characterised by an English writer by the following quotation from Molière" (followed by the verse from Molière printed above).

It becomes clear that Marx took not only this quotation, but also the "continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's budget speeches of 1863 and 1864", invented by the author of The Theory of the Exchanges, from this book.

1. * * *

b) At was already remarked in the introduction to this reprint, Engels, in the fourth edition of the first volume of Marx's Capital, p. 617, added "The Morning Star, April 17, 1863" to the now-as-ever falsely reproduced quotation from Gladstone's budget speech. The relevant portions of this speech are given above on pp. 8 and 9 according to Hansard's shorthand report. Although on p.13 the Times report -- completely coincident in sense, with its wording condensed only as is a newspaper's wont, this report, together with that in The Morning Star quoted by Engels, and the wording of the quotation in Marx are presented parallel here:

1. The Times

April 17, 1863

"In ten years, from 1842 to 1852 inclusive, the taxable income of the country, as nearly as we can make out, increased by 6 per cent; but in eight years, from 1853 to 1861, the income of the country again increased from the basis taken by 20 per cent. That is a fact so strange as to be almost incredible... I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to the classes who are in easy circumstances. This takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described, and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, it an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property. Now, the augmentation of Capital it of indirect benefit to the labourer, because it cheapens the commodity which in the business of production comes into direct competition with labour. (Hear, hear.) But we have this profound, and, I must say inestimable consolation, that while the rich have been growing richer the poor have been growing less poor. Whether the extremes of poverty are less extreme than they were I do not presume to say, but the average condition of the British labourer, we have the happiness to know, has improved during the last twenty years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary, and which we may almost pronounce to be unexampled in the history of any country and of any age. (Cheers.)" *

2. The Morning Star

April 17, 1863

"I must say, for one, I should look with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to the classes who are in easy circumstances. This great increase of wealth takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation is an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property. But that augmentation must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities which go to the general consumption. So that we have this profound, and I almost say, inestimable consolation -while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. (Hear, hear.) At any rate, whether the extremes are less extreme than they were I do not presume to say, but the average condition of the British labourer, we have the happiness to know to be extraordinary, and that we may almost pronounce it to be unexampled in the history of any country or any age. (Cheers)"

3. Capital I, 1st ed., p. 639, Note 103

"From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country

increased by 6 per cent. In the eight years from 1853 to 1861 it

had increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible

"This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power

"is entirely confined to classes of property, but must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption --

"while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor! At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say."

Here, in the middle of a sentence, as the reprint above shows, The Theory of the Exchanges breaks off to insert a quotation from Molière; Marx who, as the comparison above shows, did not take the quotation from The Morning Star but -- omitting a passage marked by him with dots -- verbatim from The Theory of the Exchanges, has Gladstone end in the middle of a sentence...

The comparison above shows us that the arbitrarily thrown-together mosaic of sentences torn from their context, which Marx presents as Gladstone's budget speech, can be found as little in The Morning Star as in The Times or Hansard; on the other hand, it can be found solely in The Theory of the Exchanges. The heavily leaded sentences a are those omitted by Henry Roy, and still more by Karl Marx-compare the last sentence -- in order to have Gladstone say the opposite of what be really said.

4. No. 15.

FROM THE PARLIAMENTARY REPORTS

OF THE LONDON PRESS OF APRIL 17,1863

Morning Herald. I may say that I for one would look with fear and apprehension at this intoxicating increase of wealth if I were of opinion that it is confined to the classes in easy circumstances. This great increase of wealth which I have described, and which is founded on accurate returns is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital, and takes no account of the poorer classes.

Morning Post. I may say, I for one, would look with fear and apprehension when I consider this great increase of wealth if I believed that its benefits were confined to the classes in easy circumstances. This augmentation of wealth which I have described, and which is founded on accurate returns is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital, and takes no account of the augmentation of wealth of the poorer classes.

Daily Telegraph. I may say for one, that I should look almost with apprehension and alarm on this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was confined to the masses who are in easy circumstances. This question to wealth takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation stated is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property.

Daily News. I may say that I for one would look with fear and apprehension when I consider this great increase of wealth if I believed that its benefits were confined to the classes in easy circumstances. This augmentation of wealth which I have described, and which is founded upon accurate returns, is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital, and takes no account of the augmentation of wealth of the poorer classes.

Standard. I may say that I for one would look with fear and apprehension at this intoxicating increase of wealth if I were of the opinion that it was confined to the classes in easy circumstances. This great increase of wealth which I have described, and which is founded on the accurate returns is confined entirely to the augmentation of Capital, and takes no account of the poorer classes.

5. No. 16.

GLADSTONE TO BRENTANO

1. DEUTSCHES WOCHENBLATT, No. 49, DECEMBER 4,1890

Message

In number 45 of the Deutsches Wochenblatt Professor Lujo Brentano published an essay My Polemic with Karl Marx", which served at the same time as an introduction to a republication of this polemic as a pamphlet. This polemic dealt mainly with a parliamentary speech delivered by Gladstone in 1863, and which Marx reproduced in a distorted form in his Inaugural Address on the formation of the International Working Men's Association.

Obviously nobody is more qualified to settle this dispute about the wording of Gladstone's speech than Gladstone himself. It is therefore of special interest that Gladstone, as a result of the republication of Brentano's polemic with Marx, has addressed two letters to Brentano. On November 22 Gladstone wrote to Brentano: "You are completely correct, and Marx completely incorrect", and on November 28: "I undertook no changes of any sort". Thus the affair, which throws a revealing light on the Social Democratic line of argumentation, may finally be decided to the detriment of the Social Democratic standpoint.

By uncovering this deceit Brentano has done a service, and it was very timely that he chose this precise moment to rekindle the memories of this dispute.

O.A.

6. No. 17.

ENGELS' REPLY TO No. 16

1. DIE NEUE ZEIT, No. 13, 1891, p.425

2. In the Case of Brentano V. Marx

In my preface to the fourth edition of Marx's Capital, Vol. I, I was obliged to report upon the course of Mr. Lujo Brentano's favourite anonymous campaign against Marx, a campaign based upon the charge that Marx had forged a quotation from a speech by Gladstone.

Mr. Brentano responded to this with a pamphlet My Polemic with Karl Marx by Lujo Brentano, Berlin, Walter und Apolant, 1890.1 shall reply to this in his own coin.

In the meantime, No. 49 of the Deutsches Wochenblatt, December 4, 1890, carries a further note on this matter, which states:

"Obviously nobody is more qualified to settle this dispute about the wording of Gladstone's speech than Gladstone himself. It is therefore of special interest that Gladstone, as a result of the republication of Brentano's polemic with Marx, has addressed two letters to Brentano. On November 22 Gladstone wrote to Brentano: 'You are completely correct, and Marx completely incorrect', and on November 28: 'I undertook no changes of any sort'."

What is this supposed to mean? In what "are you completely correct" and Marx "completely incorrect"? In what "have I undertaken no changes of any sort"? Why is Mr. Brentano's message confined to these two short sentences?

Either Mr. Gladstone has not given his permission to publish the whole of the letters. This is then proof enough that they prove nothing.

Or else Mr. Gladstone wrote the letters in the first place for the public, and permitted Mr. Brentano to make what use he would of them. Then the publication only of these meaningless extracts proves even more strongly that Mr. Gladstone's testimony in its entirety is unusable for Mr. Brentano, and therefore "bodged together" as above.

In order to know what the two sentences above are worth, we must have before us not only the two letters from Mr. Gladstone, but also the relevant letters from Mr. Brentano. And as long as the whole correspondence in this matter has not been published in the original language, the fragments above are completely insignificant to the question under dispute, and not worth the paper they are printed on.

F. Engels

Table of Contents

Title

Contents

Preface

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Documents

No, 1. The Inaugural Address (of the First International)

No. 2. CAPITAL

No. 3. THE CHARGE

No. 4.Karl Marx's Reply

No. 5.RETORT BY ANONYMOUS

No. 6.MARX'S SECOND REPLY

No. 7.THE REJOINDER OF ANONYMOUS

No. 8.ATTACK BY S. TAYLOR

No. 9.ELEANOR MARX'S REPLY

No. 10.SEDLEY TAYLOR'S RETORT

No. 11.ELEANOR MARX'S SECOND REPLY

No. 12.FROM ENGELS' PREFACE TO THE FOURTH GERMAN EDITION OF MARX'S

No. 13.BRENTANO'S REPLY

No. 14.FROM THE APPENDICES TO BRENTANO'S REPLY

No. 15.FROM THE PARLIAMENTARY REPORTSOF THE LONDON PRESS OF APRIL 17,1863

No. 16.GLADSTONE TO BRENTANO

No. 17.ENGELS' REPLY TO No. 16