Sir, In his last epistle to you, Mr. Charles Bradlaugh makes the report of the sitting of the General Council of December 12th a sitting from which I was absent in consequence of illness the pretext for discharging upon me his ruffianism. He says, My enmity to Mr. Charles Bradlaugh! Ever since the publication of the Address on the Civil War in France, Mr. Bradlaugh s voice has chimed in with the world-wide chorus of slander against the International and myself. I treated him, like the other revilers, with contemptuous silence. This was more than the grotesque vanity of that huge self-idolater could stand. I calumniated him because I took no notice of his calumnies. My silence drove him mad; in a public meeting he denounced, me as a Bonapartist because, in the Address on the Civil War, I had, forsooth, laid bare the historic circumstances that gave birth to the Second Empire. He now goes a step further and transforms me into a police agent of Bismarck. Poor man! He must needs show that the lessons he has recently received at Paris from the infamous Emile de Girardin and his clique are not lost upon him. For the present, I shall betray him to the German public by giving the greatest possible circulation to his epistle. If he be kind enough to clothe his libels in a more tangible shape, I shall betray him to an English law-court. I am, Sir, Yours obediently, London, December 20th
Works Frederick Engels 1871