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the question: 'Was Bakunin a Russian agent or not?' Of course, the answer was in the affirmative. This act was so outrageous that it perturbed even people who took no particular interest in Bakunin.
The affair could not possibly be left there. However annoying it was to have to sign a joint protestation13 with Golovin (there will be a separate chapter on this subject) ,14 there was no choice. I invited Worcell and Mazzini to associate themselves with our protest, and they agreed at once. One might have thought that, after the testimony of the President of the Polish democratic Central Government and of such a man as Mazzini, the whole thing was finished ; but the Germans were not satisfied with this: they dragged on a most boring polemic with Golovin, who kept it up on his side to interest in himself the customers of London public-houses.
My protest, and the fact that I had written to Mazzini and Worcell, was bound to direct Marx's rage against me. This anyhow was the time when the Germans realised their mistake, and began to encompass me with a boorish hostility on a par with the boorish advances that they had formerly made to me. They no longer wrote me panegyrics, as at the time when Vom andern Ufer and Letters from Italy appeared, but spoke of me as 'the insolent barbarian who dares to look down his nose at Germany.'15 One of the Marxist Gesellen wrote a complete book against me and sent it to Hofmann and Campe, who declined to publish it. Then he got it printed (I learnt this much later) i n The Leader, o f which I hav.e spoken. I d o not recollect his name.
The Marxists were soon joined by a knight with his visor 13 The letter signed by Golovin, Herzen and Worcell, appeared in The Morning Advertiser of 29th August, 1 853. See also the letter from Marx printed in The Morning Advertiser of 2nd September. (A.S.) H Later Herzen devotes twenty pages to his depressing encounters with I. Golovin, which are omitted here. Judging from Herzen's account, con·
crete and documented as usual, I. Golovin was a paranoid adventurer and clearly a man to avoid. But, unlike Marx, Herzen was unable to be reclusive either by temperament or on principle. "I was visited for the first time by I. Golovin, who until then was known to me only from his mediocre writings and from his exceedingly bad reputation as an in·
solent and quarrelsome man," he writes as of 1 848. But ten years later he was still entangled with the Golovin tar-baby. ( D.M. ) 15 This was written by one Kolachek in an American periodical on the subject of the second French edition of On the DPvelopment of Revolutionnry Ideas in Russia. The piquancy of it lies in the fact that the whole text of this book had been formerly published in German by that same Kolachek!
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lowered, Karl Blind, then a famulus of Marx, now his enemy. In his account in New York papers, mention was made of a dinner given to us by the American consul in London:16 'At this dinner there was a Russian, A. H. by name, who passes himself off as a socialist and republican. H. lives in close association with Mazzini, Kossuth and Saffi . . . . It is extremely careless of people who arc at the head of movements to admit a Russian to their acquaintance. We hope that they will not have to repent of this when it is too late.'
Whether Blind himself, or one of his assistants, wrote this I do not knO\v: I have not the text before me, but I will answer for the sense of it.
VVhile I am on the subject I must observe that both on Blind's side and on Marx's, whom I did not know at all, all this hatred was purely Platonic-impersonal, so to speak: they were sacrificing me to their Vatcrland out of patriotism. At the American dinner, by the '.vay, they were infuriated by the absence of a German-so they took it out on the Russian.
This dinner, which made a great deal of noise on both sides of the Atlantic, came about in the following way. President Pierce was being sulky with the old European governments and playing all sorts of schoolboy pranks. This was possibly in order to gain greater popularity at home, and partly to divert the eyes of all the radical parties in Europe from the main jewel on which his whole policy turned-the imperceptible expansion and consoliJation of slavery.
This was the time of <he embassy of Soule to Spain and of Robert Owen's sonl i to Naples, soon after Soule's duel with Turgot and his insistent request to be allowed to travel, notwithstanding Napoleon's order, through France and Brussels, which the Emperor of the French could not make up his mind to refuse.
'\Ve send ambassadors,' the Americans said, 'not to kings but to peoples.' Hence arose the idea of giving a diplomatic dinner to the enemies of all existing governments.
I had no notion of the dinner that was being arranged. I 1 6 On 2 1 st February, 1 85-k ( A .S. )
17 Pierre Soule had emi�rated in 1 82-� from France to the U.S.A. He went ns arnhassador to Spain in 1 853; he fought a duPI with the Marquis de Turgot, the French ambassador, in Madrid. RobPrt Dale Owen took an active part in Arncric"n politics from the 1 830s onwMds, and from 1 853-8
was Uni ted S ta les ambassador at the Court of the Two Sicilies. ( A .S.)
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suddenly received an invitation from Saunders, the American consul ; with the invitation was enclosed a little note from Mazzini : he asked me not to refuse, saying that the dinner was being given to annoy someone and to demonstrate sympathy with somebody else.
There were at the dinner Mazzini, Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin, Garibaldi, Orsini, Worcell, Pulszki and myself, one Englishman, Joshua Wolmsley, M.P., and Buchanan, the United States ambassador, and all the embassy officials.
It should bt> mentioned that on<> of the objt>cts of the red dinner, given by the defender of black slavery, was that Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin should meet. The idea was not to reconcile them, for they had nPwr quarrelled, but to introduc<> tht>m to each other officially. The reasons why they had not made each other's acquaintance was as follO\ ... -s. Ledru-Rollin was already in London when Kossuth arrived from Turkey. The question arose, which should call first, Ledru-Rollin on Kossuth or Kossuth on Ledru-Rollin. The question greatly agitated their friends and supporters, their Court, the brigade of guards and the rabble that followed them. The pro and contra were considerable. One had been dictator of Hungary; the other had not been a dictator, but then he was a Frenchman. One was a guest of honour in England, a lion of the first magnitude, at the zenith of his glory which was about to decline ; to the other England was like a home, and calls are paid by the newer arrivals . . . . In a word this problem, like the squaring of the circle or the perpetuum mobile, was found by both courts to be insoluble . . . therefore it was solved by a decision that neither should call on the other, and a meeting between them was left to the will of God and to chance . . . . For three or four years Ledru-Rollin and Kossuth, living in the same town, having friends and interests in common and a common cause, had to ignore each other, and chance there was none. Mazzini decided to give destiny a helping hand.