In an article from London dated January 13 the Bremer Tages-Chronik of January 17 this year has imported a whole cargo of badly-written stupidities, of fabricated and misunderstood gossip, of clumsy insinuations and moral posturing against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and against the undersigned.
"Prominent and decided men" [3] of the calibre of this London correspondent have from time immemorial responded to superior criticism in the manner of apes. They bombard their enemy with their own excrement. Chacun selon ses facultés}(1)
We let this "decided and prominent" man off with his nicely fabricated little stories about the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In answer to his well-meaning insinuations on our resignation from the Great Windmill Society(2) we declare:
Neither before nor after their resignation from this Society have Engels and Marx ever had the slightest connection with the management of its funds. They took part in the management of the refugee fund, and resigned only after their administration up to that point had been audited and found correct.(3) That the resignation occurred to avoid the payment of a monthly contribution of ninepence — this is the notion of a Reichs-Stiiber(4) which has been thrown out of circulation! And for this purpose one of them is said to have moved to Manchester and the other to have wished to travel overseas. What pure pearls rest in the depths of morally incensed souls!
The real motives for our resignation from the Society and for our parting with its leaders are known to our party comrades in Germany. They are approved and shared by them, they do not concern the general public. Under existing German conditions a more skilful agent provocateur would not have given us cause for further explanations, much less the bearishlya clumsy one of the Bremer Tages-Chronik.
It suffices in conclusion to indicate that the man besmirching the Bremer Tages-Chronik from London with his own guano is none other than that Pomeranian thinker to whom the Neue Rheinische Zeitung has constantly returned with a kind of artistic preference, whom we have characterised elsewhere on the basis of his writings as "the gutter into which all the rhetorical refuse and all the contradictions of German democracy flow together", in a word, that the fellow in Bremen is no less a person than "Arnold Winkelried Ruge", the fifth wheel on the carriage of state of European central democracy.[385]
Now one can understand the depravity of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
London, January 27, 1851
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels
Endnotes
[384] This statement was written by Marx after discussion with Engels (see Marx's letter to Engels of January 22 and Engels' letter to Marx of January 25, 1851). It was aimed against Arnold Ruge, who attacked Marx and Engels in the press accusing them, among other things, of being party to the appropriation of the funds belonging to the German Workers' Educational Society in London. (Ruge's insinuations were partly provoked by the Willich-Schapper faction.) On January 27, Marx sent the text of the statement to Manchester for Engels to sign and forward to the press. Marx intended to publish it in the Bremen newspaper Weser-Zeitung and then in the New-Yorker Staatszeitung but it was not printed in either. The extant original is in Jenny Marx's handwriting.
[3] In May 1849, when the counter-revolution was on the upsurge, the Prussian Government issued an order expelling Marx and the other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from Prussia. This measure, prepared well in advance, was applied when the main uprisings in the Rhine Province had been virtually suppressed. On his return to Cologne in April 1848, Marx applied for Prussian citizenship which he had been forced to renounce in 1845 when he was living in Belgium as an emigrant. Despite the Cologne Magistrate's favourable reply to his application, however, the Cologne royal district authorities and the Minister of the Interior refused to grant it, and Marx remained a "foreigner", who could at any moment be accused of abusing hospitality and expelled. The royal district authorities' note to this effect followed on May 11, 1849, and on May 16 Marx was given 24 hours to leave Prussia. Weerth and Dronke, who did not enjoy Prussian citizenship either, received similar orders. Legal proceedings were instituted against Engels for his part in the Elberfeld uprising. The last issue, No. 301, of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on May 19, 1849.
[385] At the time Engels was working on a series of articles intended for the Friend of the People, the weekly edited by George Julian Harney, about leaders of European petty-bourgeois democrats. His intention did not materialise, however, owing to disagreements with Harney. At a later date Marx and Engels used this material for their pamphlet The Great Men of the Exile where, giving a satirical characteristic of Ruge, they employed such expressions as the "gutter", "Arnold Winkelried Ruge" and the like, which originally must have occurred in the articles intended for the Friend of the People (see present edition, Vol. 11). In the pamphlet, just as in the given statement, Ruge is described as "the fifth wheel on the carriage of state of European central democracy" (this refers to his being a member of the Central Committee of European Democracy — see Note 272).