Brentano vs. Marx

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

 

IV

ENGELS AND BRENTANO

No. 12.

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

 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

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