Preface to the Fourth German Edition

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 note-books, 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 note- books 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: "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: