Marx-Engels Correspondence 1870
Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
From the Continent, where people were and are used, even at Moscow and St. Petersburg, even in the French papers under the Bonapartist rule, even now at Berlin, to see the manifestoes of the International treated seriously and reproduced in full by some journal or other, we have been once and again taunted for our negligence in not using the “free” London press. They have, of course, no idea whatsoever, and will not believe in the utter corruption of that vile concern, long since branded by William Cobbett as “mercenary, infamous, and illiterate.”
Now I believe you would do the greatest possible service to the International, and I should take good care — to have your article reproduced in our journals in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Hungary, Germany, France, and the United States — if you in the Fortnightly Review would publish something on the International, the manifestoes of the General Council on the war and the treatment we have to undergo at the hands of that paragon press, that “free” English press! Those fellows are in fact more enslaved to the Prussian police than the Berlin papers.