1\Iarx wrote later, 'was in the interests of the cause and in the interests of Bakunin.'
Bakunin"s protest and his request to George Sand to refute the rumour appeared in a Breslau newspaper; they were at once reprinted in Marx's paper of 1 6th July, 1 848. On 3rd August Marx printed a complete rehabilitation of Bakunin by George Sand, and gave his reasons for publishing the slander, one of which was to give Bakunin an opportunity of vindicating himself. Bakunin was satisfied. He and Marx met in Berlin towards the end of 1 848 and 'renewed their friendship.' (A.S.) This gloss by the Academy of Sciences is more academic than scientific.
An editor who prints a slanderous rumor about an opponent does afford the latter "an opportunity of vindicating himself," in a sense-a Pickwickian sense. But assuming Marx's chief concern was, as he states, to protect "the interests of Bakunin_" one might expect a simpler, less ambiguous method to occur to that formidable brain, namely, to ask George Sand about it before he printed anything. One wonders whether Marx reprinted the Sand refutation of the canard (and after Reichel, not Marx, had asked her to set the matter straight) as the foreseen climax of a Bakunin vindication campaign? Or whether he was simply, and cruelly, caught with his polemical pants down? I'm also curious about the source of "renewed their close friendship"-perhaps some Comrade Smooth-It-Away in the Soviet Academy? That Marx and Bakunin, given their politics-and their temperaments-were ever close friends, however briefly, seems unlikely, nor doo:>s this friendship figure in any histories or biographies I have read. ( D.M.) 9 Bakunin was arrested for participating in the Dresden rising of May 1 849-almost a year after the correspondence appeared in Marx's newspaper. (A.S.)
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and moral aphorisms, and would have masked it with his despair qu'on avail surpris sa religion; but even an English editor, though incomparably less punctilious, would not have dared to shift the responsibility to his colleagues.10
A year after my arrival in London Marx's party returned again to their vile calumny of Bakunin, who was then entombed in the Alexeyevsky ravelin.
In England, this time-honoured country of the crazed, one of the most egregious positions is occupied by David Urquhart? a man of talent and energy, an ex-conservative radical, who is obsessed by two notions: first, that Turkey is a superlative country with a great future, in virtue of which he has furnished himself with Turkish cooking, a Turkish bath and Turkish sofas; secondly, that Russian diplomacy is the slyest and most astute in the whole of Europe, and that it bribes and bamboozles all the statesmen in every country in the world, principally in England.
Urquhart worked for years to find a proof that Palmerston was in the pay of the cabinet in Petersburg. He published articles and pamphlets on this, introduced motions in Parliament and held forth at meetings. At first people were angered by him, replied to 10 I n spite of the fact that England takes fearful liberties. To give an idea of them I shall tell of something that happened to Louis Blanc. The Times published a report that Louis Blanc, when he was a member of the PrO\·isional Government, had spent '1 ,500,000 francs of the government's money, to form for himself a party among the workers.' Blanc replied to the editor that he had been m isinformed about him a nd that.
however much he had wanted to. he would not have been able to steal or to spend 1 Y2 million francs because, during all the time that he was at the head of the Luxemburg Commission, he had not had at his disposal more than 30,000 francs. The Times did not print his reply. Louis Blanc went to the editorial office himself and requested an interview with the editor-in-chief. He was told that there was no such person as an editorin-chief; that The Times was published as it were by a committee. Blanc demanded an accountable committee-man: he was told that nobody was personally answerable for anything.
'\Vhom, then, should I see, from whom demand an account of why my letter about an affair which concerned my good name, was not published.'
'Here,' one of the officials on The Times told him, 'things are not done as they are in France ; we have neither a gerant responsable nor a legal obligation to print replies.'
'There is absolutely no accountable editor?' Louis Blanc asked.
'I\o.'
'It's a very great pity,' remarked Louis Blanc, smiling angrily, 'that there is no editor-in-chief; othenvise I should certainly have boxed his ears. Good-bye, gentlemen.'
'Good day, Sir, good day. God bless you" repeated The Times's official, coolly and courteously opening the door.
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him and abused him; then they became a ccustomed to him.
Those he accused and those who listened to the accusations began to smile; they paid no attention . . . finally they burst out laughing.
Lecturing to a meeting in one of the big towns Urquhart was so carried away by his idee fixe that, representing Kossuth as a man not to be trusted, he a dded that even if Kossuth had not been bought by Russia he was under the influence of a man who clearly was working on behalf of Russia . . . and that man was Mazzini! Like Dante's Francesca, that day he read no more. At the name of Mazzini there rose such a gale of Homeric laughter that David himself remarked that he had not knocked over the Italian Goliath with his sling, but had dislocated his own arm.
A man who thought and openly said that from Guizot and Derby to Espartero, Cobden and Mazzini, they were all Russian agents, was a boon to the gang of unacknowledged German statesmen ,..,·ho surrounded an unrecognised genius of the first order-Marx. They made, of their unsuccessful patriotism and fearful pretensions, a kind of Hochschule of calumny and suspicion of anyone who came on to the stage with greater success than theirs. They were in need of an honourable name: Urquhart gave them one.
Urquhart had at that time great influence with The Morning Advertiser, one of those newspapers that are very peculiarly run.
This papPr is not to be seen in the clubs, at the big news agents or on the tables of respectable people, but it has a bigger circulation than the Daily News, and it is only recently tha t cheap sheets like the Daily Telegraph and The Morning and Evening Star have pushed The Morning Advertiser into the background.
It is a purely English phenomenon: The Morning Advertiser is the public-house newspaper, and no tavern would be without it.
With Urquhart and the customers of public houses the Marxists and their friends11 declared themselves in the pages of The Morning Advertiser. 'Where there is beer, there will be Germans.'
One fine morning12 The Morning Advertiser suddenly raised II In reality Marx not only d id not keep up any close connection with The Morning Advertiser but even expressed himself very sharply more than once about the paper's politics and about the personal qualities of the editor and publishers. He considered it to be 'Pam's [ i.e., Pal merston's ( D.M. ) l barrel-organ.' ( A .S. ) 12 2nd August, 1853. (A.S.)