19. Letter of the General Council to Robert William Hume in New York
London, April 23, 1870
Dear Sir, in answer to yours of the 26th ult. I am directed by the Council to state that the International Association recognises no special national interests among the working men who may happen to have been born in different countries.
One of our aims is to eliminate whatever may yet remain of national antipathies and, perhaps, animosities, from the minds of working men. The Council cannot, therefore, endorse the kind of representation implied in your memorial. General Cluseret had his feelings outraged by the French police, which was probably the reason why the trade societies gave him credentials which induced him to institute a comparison between himself and the French ambassador at Washington.[503] The French ambassador at Washington has to vindicate the personal interests of a dynasty, and the property interests of the French traders. The Paris workmen have no such interests to be taken care of on the other side of the Atlantic, against the probable encroachments of the American working men. We consider the interests of the French workmen resident in the United States strictly identical with the interests of all the other working men of the United States.
To facilitate the inter-communication of such as may be separated by difference of language, and perhaps manners, we have correspondents, who are conversant with these things, and to them we trust for managing the rest.
The communication with the United States is distributed among the secretaries of the different nationalities of the General Council. General Cluseret and Mr. Pelletier are our French correspondents in America. They correspond with our Secretary for France.[11] Siegfried Meyer and Vogt are our German correspondents. They correspond with the German Secretary[13] here, and the General Secretary[1] manages the English correspondence; and beside such trade union officers as Mr. Jessup, we look to you as our correspondent in case any misunderstanding should arise between different nationalities, to endeavour to set matters right, but we cannot admit that either French or Germans have an opposite or special interest from any other workmen, and we always urge them on to take an active part in, and identify themselves with, the movement of the working men of the country, in which they reside, particularly in America.
Respecting the secret society movement, I am instructed to ask you to favour us at your convenience with your opinion as to the cause which has tended to bring about the necessity for secret action. We have been advised to persuade you and friend Jessup to publicly stand up against it, but we suppose there is a necessity for it, or else it would not have come into vogue and moreover it would be presumptuous on our part to offer advice in such a matter, but we wish to know the reasons, to bring them to the knowledge of the working men of the Old World, who have just emerged from conducting their agitation in secret.
Yours faithfully,
/. George Eccarius, General Secretary
Read at the General Council meeting of May 24, 1870
Endnotes
[5 0 3] In March 1870, Cluseret was appointed the General Council's agent for establishing contacts with the French sections in the USA. However, passing himself off as an organiser of the International, Cluseret ignored the already existing sections in the USA and exceeded his powers. Soon, certain sections of the International in the USA censured his behaviour and approached the General Council, Johann Philipp Becker and Eugene Varlin with an inquiry concerning the powers granted to Cluseret. Marx replied to the inquiry in his letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt of April 9, 1870 and mentioned the matter in a letter to Sorge dated September 1, 1870 (see present edition, Vol. 43).
[11] The text of this resolution, adopted by the General Council meeitng of August 25, 1868 in connection with the preparations for the Brussels Congress, has been preserved in the minutes of this meeting; it was also published in The Bee-Hive, No. 359, August 29, 1868 (for the record of Marx's speech in substantiating this resolution see this volume, p. 387). At the Brussels Congress this resolution was moved by Eccarius and read in the report of the commission on reducing the working day on September 12, 1868. It was published in English in the reports of the Congress sittings in The Times, No. 26232, September 17, 1868 and in the pamphlet The International Working Men's. Association. Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva, 1866, and the Congress of Brussels, 1868 published in London in 1869; in French it was published in a special supplement to Le Peuple Belge, No. 399, September 18, La Cigale, No. 38, September 20 and La Tribune du Peuple, No. 10, November 8, 1868.
[13] 3 Jules Gottraux, a Swiss-born subject of Great Britain and a member of the International, was detained by the French police on the French-Swiss frontier on September 30, 1866 when he was returning to London from his trip to Switzerland. The police confiscated letters, printed matter, and other material entrusted to him by the International's leaders in Geneva to be handed over to the General Council. The documents seized included the preliminary report on the work of the Geneva Congress which had been drawn up by Council member Frederick Card and published in Geneva as a pamphlet in French. (Later, this gave rise to a rumour that the French authorities had confiscated the Congress minutes, which in reality had by that time been brought to London by Hermann Jung.) The General Council lodged a complaint with the French Minister of Home Affairs about this irregularity and demanded the return of the seized documents. When he refused to reply to the complaint, written by Fox on the Council's instructions, the General Council decided to use the fact publicly to expose the regime of the Second Empire (see also the record of Marx's speech at the General Council meeting of November 27, 1866, present edition, Vol. 20, p. 414). At the beginning of December the Council approached the British Foreign Secretary, asking him to make a corresponding demarche to the French Government, which forced the French authorities to return, on December 21, the materials taken from Gottraux. Fox wrote a special article on the actions of the Bonapartist authorities. It was published in The Commonwealth on January 12, 1867 and in The Working Man on February 1, 1867.
[1] In the autumn of 1867 the General Council of the International Working Men's Association launched a widespread campaign among the English workers in support of the Irish national liberation movement led by the Fenians. The memorial written by Marx was an integral part of this campaign. The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who named themselves after the "Féne"— a name of the ancient population of Ireland. Their first organisations appeared in the 1850s in the USA among the Irish immigrants and later in Ireland itself. The secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as the organisation was known in the early 1860s, aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic by means of an armed uprising. The Fenians, who expressed the interests of the Irish peasantry, came chiefly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and believed in conspiracy tactics. The British Government attempted to suppress the Fenian movement by severe police reprisals. On September 18, 1867, the Fenians made an armed attack on a prison van in an attempt to liberate Kelly and Deasy, two of their leaders. The latter managed to escape but a policeman was killed during the clash. Five Irishmen (Maguire, Condon, Larkin, Allen and O'Brien) were charged with murder and brought to trial. Although there was no direct evidence, they were sentenced to death. Maguire was subsequently pardoned, and Condon, as an American citizen, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The others were executed. The Fenian trial in Manchester aroused a storm of protest in Ireland and England. On the insistence of Marx, the General Council of the International began, on November 19, a discussion on the Irish question during which the leaders of the international proletarian organisation expressed their solidarity with the struggle of the Irish people for independence and condemned the position of the reformist trade union leaders who, in the wake of the English bourgeois radicals, denied the right of the Fenians to resort to revolutionary methods in the struggle. The discussion was scheduled to continue on November 26 (see this volume, pp. 189-93), but when the news of the conviction was received, the General Council convened a special meeting on November 20 and addressed a memorial to the Home Secretary asking for the commutation of the death sentence. The British Government ignored the memorial. Because of opposition from the trade union leaders, the English labour press did not publish the memorial in its original wording. A report on the special meeting of the General Council, published in The Bee-Hive, No. 319, November 23, 1867, only summarised it, and named the General Council members who had signed it. The French translation was published by Le Courrier français, No. 163, November 24. In English the memorial was first published in full in The General Council of the First International. 1866-1868, Moscow, 1964. This document is also preserved in the form of the manuscript copy made by Mrs. Marx which fully coincides with the text entered into the Minute Book. Written as an article, this copy was apparently to be sent to the press. In this volume the memorial is reproduced from this copy.