Capital Volume I

 

 

Preface to the Fourth German Edition 

(Engels, 1890) 

The fourth edition required that I should establish in final form, as nearly as possible, both text 

and footnotes. The following brief explanation will show how I have fulfilled this task. 

After again comparing the French edition and Marx’s manuscript remarks I have made some 

further additions to the German text from that translation. They will be found on p. 80 (3rd 

edition, p. 88) [present edition, pp. 117-18], pp. 458-60 (3rd edition, pp. 509-10) [present edition, 

pp. 462-65],

1

  pp. 547-51 (3rd edition, p. 600) [present edition, pp. 548-51], pp. 591-93 (3rd 

edition, p. 644) [present edition, 587-89] and p. 596 (3rd edition, p. 648) [present edition, p. 591] 

in Note 1. I have also followed the example of the French and English editions by putting the 

long footnote on the miners into the text (3rd edition, pp. 509-15; 4th edition, pp. 461-67) 

[present edition, pp. 465-71]. Other small alterations are of a purely technical nature. 

Further, I have added a few more explanatory notes, especially where changed historical 

conditions seemed to demand this. All these additional notes are enclosed in square brackets and 

marked either with my initials or “D. H.” 

2

 

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 re-translations from the 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 note-book 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. 562, note 47). Marx probably slipped up when writing 

down the title of the book.

3

 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 

Workingmen’s Association, 1864, and repeated in “Capital,” Vol. I, p. 617, 4th edition; p. 671, 

3rd edition) [present edition, p. 610], had been falsified; that not a single word of the sentence: 

---

23 

 

Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels 1890) 

 

“this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... is ... entirely confined to classes of 

property” was to be found in the (semi-official) stenographic report in Hansard. “But this 

sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone’s speech. Exactly the opposite is stated there.” (In 

bold type): “This sentence, both in form and substance, is a lie inserted by Marx." 

Marx, to whom the number of Concordia was sent the following May, answered the anonymous 

author in the Volksstaat of June 1st. 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 cognisance 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 possessed 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 the version which he afterwards manipulated 

[zurechtgestümpert], Mr. Gladstone was astute enough to obliterate [wegzupfuschen] this 

passage, which, coming from an English Chancellor of the Exchequer, was certainly 

compromising. This, by the way, is a traditional usage in the English parliament and not an 

invention gotten up by little Lasker against Bebel.” 

The anonymous writer gets angrier and angrier. In his answer in Concordia, July 4th, he sweeps 

aside second-hand sources and demurely suggests that it is the “custom” to quote parliamentary 

speeches from the stenographic report; adding, however, that The Times report (which includes 

the “falsified” sentence) and the Hansard report (which omits it) are “substantially in complete 

agreement,” while The Times report likewise contains “the exact opposite to 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, the anonymous one 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 allegation,” “that spurious quotation,” “impudent mendacity,” “a quotation entirely 

falsified,” “this falsification,” “simply infamous,” etc., he finds it necessary to divert the issue to 

another domain and therefore promises “to explain in a second article the meaning which we (the 

non-mendacious anonymous one) attribute 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 Concordia on July 11th. 

Marx replied again in the Volksstaat of August 7th 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 inserted.” 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 

---