Brentano vs. Marx

forged", "this forgery", "simply nefarious", etc., he finds it necessary to divert the issue to another domain and therefore

promises "to explain in a second article the importance which we" (the non-"mendacious" Anonymous) "attach to the content of

Gladstone's words". As if his particular opinion, of no decisive value as it is, had anything whatever to do with the matter. This

second article was printed in the Concordia on July 11.

 Marx replied again in the Volksstaat of August 7 now giving also the reports of the passage in question from The Morning Star

and The Morning Advertiser of April 17, 1863. According to both reports Gladstone said that he would look with apprehension,

etc., upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if he believed it to be confined to CLASSES IN EASY

CIRCUMSTANCES. But this augmentation was in fact ENTIRELY CONFINED TO CLASSES POSSESSED OF

PROPERTY. So these reports too reproduced word for word the sentence alleged to have been "lyingly added". Marx further

established once more, by a comparison of the Times and the Hansard texts, that this sentence, which three newspaper reports

of identical content, appearing independently of one another the next morning, proved to have been really uttered, was missing

from the Hansard report, revised according to the familiar "custom", and that Gladstone, to use Marx's words, "had

subsequently filched it away". In conclusion Marx stated that he had no time for further intercourse with Anonymous. The latter

also seems to have had enough, at any rate Marx received no further issues of Concordia.

 With this the matter appeared to be dead and buried. True, once or twice later on there reached us, from persons in touch with

the University of Cambridge, mysterious rumours of an unspeakable literary crime which Marx was supposed to have

committed in Capital; but despite all investigation nothing more definite could be learned. Then, on November 29, 1883, eight

months after Marx's death, there appeared in The Times a letter dated from Trinity College, Cambridge, and signed Sedley

Taylor, in which this little man, who dabbles in the mildest sort of co-operative affairs, seizing upon some chance pretext or

other, at last enlightened us, not only concerning those vague Cambridge rumours, but also Anonymous in the Concordia.

 

"What appears extremely singular," says the little man from Trinity College, "is that it was reserved for Professor

Brentano (then of the University of Breslau, now of that of Strassburg) to expose ... the bad faith which had manifestly

dictated the citation made from Mr. Gladstone's speech in the '(Inaugural)' Address. Herr Karl Marx, who ... attempted to

defend the citation, had the hardihood, in the DEADLY SHIFTS to which Brentano's masterly conduct of the attack

speedily reduced him, to assert that Mr. Gladstone had 'manipulated' the report of his speech in The Times of April 17,

1863, before it appeared in Hansard, in order to 'obliterate' a passage which 'was certainly compromising for an English

Chancellor of the Exchequer'. On Brentano's showing, by a detailed comparison of texts, that the reports of The Times

and of Hansard agreed in utterly excluding the meaning which craftily-isolated quotation had put upon Mr. Gladstone's

words, Marx withdrew from further controversy under the plea of 'want of time!'"

 

So that was at the bottom of the whole business! And thus was the anonymous campaign of Mr. Brentano in the Concordia

gloriously reflected in the productively co-operating imagination of Cambridge. Thus he stood, sword in hand, and thus he

battled, in his "masterly conduct of the attack", this St. George of the German Manufacturers' Association, whilst the infernal

dragon Marx, "in deadly shifts", "speedily" breathed his last at his feet.

 All this Ariostian battle-scene, however, only serves to conceal the dodges of our St. George. Here there is no longer talk of

"lying addition" or "forgery", but of "CRAFTILY ISOLATED QUOTATION". The whole issue was shifted, and St. George

and his Cambridge squire very well knew why.

 Eleanor Marx replied in the monthly journal To-Day (February 1884) a, as The Times refused to publish her letter. She once

more focused the debate on the sole question at issue: had Marx "lyingly added" that sentence or not? To this Mr. Sedley Taylor

answered that

 

"the question whether a particular sentence did or did not occur In Mr. Gladstone's speech" had been, in his opinion, "of

very subordinate importance" in the Brentano-Marx controversy, "compared to the issue whether the quotation in dispute

was made with the intention of conveying, or of perverting, Mr. Gladstone's meaning".

 

He then admits that the Times report contains "a verbal contrariety"; but, if the context is rightly interpreted, i.e., in the

Gladstonian Liberal sense, it shows what Mr. Gladstone meant to say. (To-Day, March 1884) The most comic point here is that

our little Cambridge man now insists upon quoting the speech not from Hansard, as, according to the anonymous Brentano, it is

"customary" to do, but from the Times report, which the same Brentano had characterised as "necessarily bungling". Naturally

so, for in Hansard the vexatious sentence is missing.

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 Eleanor Marx had no difficulty (in the same issue of To-Day) in dissolving all this argumentation into thin air. Either Mr.

Taylor had read the controversy of 1872 in which case he was now making not only "lying additions" but also "lying

suppressions"; or he had not read it and ought to remain silent. In either case it was certain that he did not dare to maintain for a

moment the accusation of his friend Brentano that Marx had made a "lying" addition. On the contrary, Marx, it now seems, had

not lyingly added hut suppressed an important sentence. But this same sentence is quoted on page 5 of the Inaugural Address, a

few lines before the alleged "lying addition". And as to the "contrariety" in Gladstone's speech, is it not Marx himself, who in

Capital, p. 618 (3rd edition, p. 672), Note 105 a refers to "the continuous crying contradictions in Gladstone's budget speeches

of 1863 and 1864"? Only he does not presume à la Mr. Sedley Taylor to resolve them into complacent Liberal sentiments.

Eleanor Marx, in concluding her reply, finally sums up as follows:

 

"Marx 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."

 

With that Mr. Sedley Taylor too had had enough, and the result of this whole professorial cobweb, spun out over two decades

and two great countries, is that nobody has since dared to cast any other aspersion upon Marx's literary honesty; whilst Mr.

Sedley Taylor, no doubt, will hereafter put as little confidence in the literary war bulletins of Mr. Brentano as Mr. Brentano will

in the papal infallibility of Hansard.

 London, June 25, 1890

Frederick Engels

 

No. 13.

BRENTANO'S REPLY

 "My Polemic with Karl Marx", Berlin, 1890, pp. 3-5

 

On September 28, 1864, a public meeting was held in St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London, at which Englishmen, Germans,

Frenchmen, Poles and Italians were represented. Karl Marx submitted to this meeting the Provisional Rules of an international

workers' organisation which was to be founded, together with the Inaugural Address he had drafted for the same. Both were

adopted unanimously, and the Inaugural Address went round the world. It contained a quotation from Gladstone's budget

speech of April 16, 1863, which attracted more attention than all the other statements contained therein:

 

"Dazzled by the 'Progress of the Nation' statistics dancing before his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in

wild ecstasy: 'From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent; in the eight years from 1853

to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible!...

This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,' adds Mr. Gladstone, 'is entirely confined to classes of property.'"

 

In the winter of 1871-72, while working on the second volume of my Die Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart, I was obliged to

investigate (cf. II, 241) to what extent the oft-heard objection -- that a wage increase diminishes the future demand for labour --

accords with the facts. In the previous decades this objection had repeatedly been used against the English trade associations

every time they called for wage increases. Here I recalled this quotation from Gladstone's budget speech. However, it appeared

to me to be unwise to quote as a source the Address of the International, as many others had, and the relevant passage in Marx's

Capital, Vol 1,1867, p.639. I consulted the shorthand report of Gladstone's budget speech and found that this in fact showed

that the wage increases in the period 1842-1861 had not limited the increase in the income of the possessing classes in any way

which negatively affected their demand for labour; but that, on the contrary Gladstone had stated in direct opposition to Karl

Marx's claim: "The figures which I have quoted take little or no cognizance of the condition of those who do not pay income

tax ... of the property of the lahouring population, or of the increase of its income... But if we look to the average condition of

the British labourer, whether peasant, or miner, or operative, or artisan, we know from varied and indubitable evidence that

during the last twenty years such an addition has been made to his means of subsistence as we may almost pronounce to be

without examp]e in the history of any country and of any age.

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