| 10 April. 1869
1, Modena Villas, Maitland Park,
Haverstock Hill, N.W.

Dear Sir,

Being aware of your services to the working class, I should before this have given myself the pleasure of sending you my last work: „Das Kapital“ (2nd and 3d volumes not yet published), if I had known you to be a German reader.

In your article on Lassalle in the Fortnightly you say first that Lassalle propagated my principles in Germany and say then that I am propagating “Lassallian principles” in England. This would indeed be what the French call “un échange de bons procédés”.

In the volume I send you, you will find Preface, p. VIII, note 1 the plain facts stated viz. that “Lassalle has taken from my writings almost literally all his general theoretical developments”, but that I “have nothing whatever to do with his practical applications”. His practical nostrum, government aid to cooperative societies, I call by courtesy his. It belongs in fact to, and was zealously preached, at the time of Louis Philippe, by Monsieur Buchez, Ex-St. Simonien, author of the “Histoire Parlèmentaire de la Rèvol. Franç.”, glorifying Robespierre and the Holy Inquisition. M. Buchez put forward his views, f. i. in the journal “L’atèlier”, in opposition to the radical views of the French communism of that time.

Since you quote my reply to Proudhon: “Misère de la Philosophy”, you cannot but be aware from its last chapter that in 1847, when all the political economists and all the socialists concurred on one single point—the condemnation of Trades' Unions, I demonstrated their historical necessity.