Address. Herr Karl Marx, who ... attempted to defend the citation, had the hardihood, in the deadly shifts to which Brentano's masterly conduct of the attack speedily reduced him, to assert that Mr. Gladstone had 'manipulated' the report of his speech in The Times of April 17, 1863, before it appeared in Hansard, in order to 'obliterate' a passage which 'was certainly compromising' for an English Chancellor of the Exchequer. On Brentano's showing, by a detailed comparison of texts, that the reports of The Times and of Hansard agreed in utterly excluding the meaning which craftily isolated quotation had put upon Mr. Gladstone's words, Marx withdrew from further controversy under the plea of 'want of time.'"

So that was at the bottom of the whole business! And thus was the anonymous campaign of Herr Brentano in Concordia gloriously reflected in the productively co-operating imagination of Cambridge. Thus he stood, sword in hand, and thus he battled, in his "masterly conduct of the attack," this St. George of the German Manufacturers' Association, whilst the infernal dragon Marx, "in deadly shifts," "speedily" breathed his last at his feet.

All this Ariostian battle-scene, however, only serves to conceal the dodges of our St. George. Here there is no longer talk of "lying insertion" or "falsification," but of "craftily isolated quotation." The whole issue was shifted, and St. George and his Cambridge squire very well knew why.

Eleanor Marx replied in the monthly journal To-day (February 1884), as The Times refused to publish her letter. She once more focussed the debate on the sole question at issue: had Marx "lyingly inserted" that sentence or not? To this Mr. Sedley Taylor answered that "the question whether a particular sentence did or did not occur in Mr. Gladstone's speech" had been, in his opinion, "of very subordinate importance" in the Brentano-Marx controversy, "compared to the issue whether the quotation in dispute was made with the intention of conveying, or of perverting Mr. Gladstone's meaning." He then admits that The Times report contains "a verbal contrariety"; but, if the context is rightly interpreted, i.e., in the Gladstonian Liberal sense, it shows what Mr. Gladstone meant to say. (To-day, March, 1884.) The most comic point here is that our little Cambridge man now insists upon quoting the speech not from Hansard, as, according to the anonymous Brentano, it is- "customary" to do, but from The Times report, which the same Brentano had characterised as "necessarily bungling." Naturally so, for in Hansard the vexatious sentence is missing.

Eleanor Marx had no difficulty (in the same issue of To-day) in dissolving all this argumentation into thin air. Either Mr. Taylor had read the controversy of 1872, in which case he was now making not only "lying insertions" but also "lying" suppressions; or he had not read it and ought to remain silent. In either case it was certain that he did not dare to maintain for a moment the accusation of his friend Brentano that Marx had made a "lying" addition. On the contrary, Marx, it now seems, had not lyingly added but suppressed an important sentence. But this same sentence is quoted on page 5 of the Inaugural Address, a few lines before the alleged "lying insertion." And as to the "contrariety" in Gladstone's speech, is it not Marx himself, who in "Capital," p. 618 (3rd edition, p. 672), note 105 [present edition, p. 611, Note 1], refers to "the continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864"? Only he does not presume à la Mr. Sedley Taylor to resolve them into complacent Liberal sentiments. Eleanor Marx, in concluding her reply, finally sums up as follows:

"Marx has not suppressed anything worth quoting, neither has he 'lyingly' added anything. But he has restored, rescued from oblivion, a particular sentence of one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches, a sentence which had indubitably been pronounced, but which somehow or other had found its way — out of Hansard."

With that Mr. Sedley Taylor too had had enough, and the result of this whole professorial cobweb, spun out over two decades and two great countries, is that nobody has since dared to cast any other aspersion upon Marx's literary honesty; whilst Mr. Sedley Taylor, no doubt, will hereafter put as little confidence in the literary war bulletins of Herr Brentano as Herr Brentano will in the papal infallibility of Hansard.

Frederick Engels
London.
June 25. 1890