Marx-Engels Correspondence 1869

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

November 17, 1869

The best joke of the Irish is to propose O'Donovan Rossa as candidate for Tipperary. If this succeeds, Gladstone will find himself in a fine fix. And now another amnesty in Italy!

I hope to read the details about the debates, etc., in the International next Sunday in the Bee-Hive. Should there be any documents, please send them on to me. Last Sunday the Bee-Hive had nothing about the International although it did report on the wedding of the Duke of Abercorn’s daughters.

You would therefore greatly oblige me by ordering it immediately at a second-hand bookseller’s. Butt’s Irish People: none in London. Other Irish pamphlets, for example, those of Lords Rosse and Lifford: cannot find. Such are the answers my bookseller received from his London agent, and he told me at the same time that in general the English book trade cannot take it upon itself to obtain publications appearing in Ireland, since it is not the custom to have a correspondent in Dublin, but only in London. I'll write directly to Duffy in Dublin.

I've found some very useful things about Ireland here: Wolfe Tone’s Memoirs, etc., in the catalogue. Whenever I ask for these things in the library, they are not to be found, like Wakefield. Some old fellow must have had all the stuff together and returned it en masse, so that the whole lot is hidden away somewhere. But in any case these things must be found.

Goldwin Smith of Irish History and Irish Character is a wise bourgeois thinker. Ireland was intended by providence as a grazing land, the prophet Léonce de Lavergne foretold it, ergo pereat, the Irish people!