Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

the Christians, all the philanthropists, all the wealthy and the wise 
doing to secure them their higher rights?
December 5, 1870
INTERVIEW WITH KARL MARX, 
THE HEAD OF L’INTERNATIONALE
R. Landor
You have asked me to fi nd out something about the International 
Association, and I have tried to do so. Th
  e enterprise is a diffi
  cult one 
just now. London is indisputably the headquarters of the association, 
but the English people have got a scare, and smell International in 
everything as King James smelled gunpowder after the famous plot. 
Th
  e consciousness of the society has naturally increased with the 
suspiciousness of the public, and if those who guide it have a secret 
to keep, they are of the stamp of men who keep a secret well. I have 
called on two of their leading members, have talked with one freely, 
and I here give you the substance of my conversation. I have satis-
fi ed myself of one thing: that it is a society of genuine workingmen, 
but that these workmen are directed by social and political theories 
of another class. One man whom I saw, a leading member of the 
council, was sitting at his workman’s bench during our interview, 
and left off  talking to me from time to time to receive a complaint, 
delivered in no courteous tone, from one of the many little masters 
in the neighborhood who employed him. I have heard this same 
man make eloquent speeches in public, inspired in every passage 
with the energy of hate toward the classes that call themselves his 
rulers. I understood the speeches after this glimpse at the domestic 
life of the orator. He must have felt that he had brains enough to 
have organized a working government, and yet here he was obliged 
to devote his life to the most revolting task work of a mechanical 
profession. He was proud and sensitive, and yet at every turn he had 
to return a bow for a grunt and a smile for a command that stood 
on about the same level in the scale of civility with a huntsman’s 
interview with karl marx  225

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call to his dog. Th
  is man helped me to a glimpse of one side of the 
nature of the International, the result of labor against capital 
of the workman who produces against the middleman who enjoys. 
Here was the hand that would smile hard when the time came, and 
as to the head that plans, I think I saw that too, in my interview 
with Dr. Karl Marx.
Dr. Karl Marx is a German doctor of philosophy, with a German 
breadth of knowledge derived both from observation of the living 
world and from books. I should conclude that he has never been 
a worker in the ordinary sense of the term. His surroundings and 
appearance are those of a well-to-do man of the middle class. Th
 e 
drawing room into which I was ushered on the night of the inter-
view would have formed very comfortable quarters for a thriving 
stockbroker who had made his competence and was now beginning 
to make his fortune. It was comfort personifi ed, the apartment of 
a man of taste and of easy means, but with nothing in it peculiarly 
characteristic of its owner. A fi ne album of Rhine views on the table, 
however, gave a clue to his nationality. I peered cautiously into the 
vase on the side table for a bomb. I sniff ed for petroleum, but the 
smell was the smell of roses. I crept back stealthily to my seat, and 
moodily awaited the worst.
He has entered and greeted me cordially, and we are sitting face-
to-face. Yes, I am tête-à-tête with the revolution incarnate, with the 
real founder and guiding spirit of the International Society, with 
the author of the address in which capital was told that if it warred 
on labor it must expect to have its house burned down about its 
ears—in a word, with the apologist for the commune of Paris. 
Do you remember the bust of Socrates? the man who died rather 
than protest his belief in the Gods of the time—the man with the 
fi ne sweep of profi le for the forehead running meanly at the end 
into a little snub, curled-up feature, like a bisected pothook, that 
formed the nose. Take this bust in your mind’s eye, color the beard 
black, dashing it here and there with puff s of gray; clap the head 
thus made on a portly body of the middle height, and the Doctor 
is before you. Th
  row a veil over the upper part of the face and you 
might be in the company of a born vestryman. Reveal the essential 
feature, the immense brow, and you know at once that you have to 
226 
WOODHULL
 & 
CLAF IN
’
S
 
WEEKLY

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deal with that most formidable of all composite individual forces—
a dreamer who thinks, a thinker who dreams.
I went straight to my business. Th
  e world, I said, seemed to be 
in the dark about the International, hating it very much but not 
able to say clearly what thing it hated. Some, who professed to 
have peered further into the gloom than their neighbors, declared 
that they had made out a sort of Janus fi gure, with a fair, honest 
workman’s smile on one of its faces, and on the other a murderous 
conspirator’s scowl. Would he light up the case of mystery in which 
the theory dwelt?
Th
  e professor laughed—chuckled a little, I fancied, at the thought 
that we were so frightened of him. “Th
  ere is no mystery to clear up, 
dear sir,” he began, in a very polished form of the Hans Breitmann 
dialect, “except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those 
who perpetually ignore the fact that our association is a public one, 
and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are published for all 
who care to read them. You may buy our rules for a penny, and a 
shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as much about 
us as we know ourselves.”
R. L.: Almost—yes, perhaps so, but will not the something I shall 
not know constitute the all-important reservation? To be quite 
frank with you, and to put the case as it strikes an outside observer, 
this general claim of depreciation of you must mean something 
more than the ignorant ill-will of the multitude. And it is still 
pertinent to ask, even after what you have told me, What is the 
International Society?
Dr. M.: You have only to look at the individuals of which it is 
composed—workmen.
R. L.: Yes, but the soldier need be no exponent of the statecraft 
that sets him in motion. I know some of your members, and I can 
believe that they are not of the stuff  of which conspirators are made. 
Besides, a secret shared by a million men would be no secret at all. 
But what if these were only the instruments in the hands of a bold 
and—I hope you will forgive me for adding—not overscrupulous 
conclave.
Dr. M.: Th
  ere is nothing to prove it.
R. L.: Th
  e last Paris insurrection?
interview with karl marx  227

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