Sir, In his immortal poem, Dante says that one of the most cruel tortures of an exile is the necessity of having to rub elbows with all sorts of people. I have deeply felt the truth of his complaint when being forced to enter for a moment into a public controversy with men like Messrs. Charles Bradlaugh and Co. I shall, however, no longer allow him to turn the quarrel he has fastened upon me into the cheap and convenient means of advertising himself abroad. He published against me an accusation which, if published in Germany, would have made him the laughing-stock of all parties, I thereupon challenged him to publish such facts as might have lent him the slightest pretext for a calumny as ridiculous as it is infamous. I did so in order, not to justify myself, but to expose him. With the low cunning of a solicitor s clerk he tries to escape this liability by inviting me to a Court of Honour. Does he really fancy that a Bradlaugh, or the editors of the Paris demi-monde Press, or those of the Bismarckian papers at Berlin, or the Tages-Presse at Vienna, or the Criminal-Zeitung at New York, or the Moscow Gazette, have only to slander me, in order to make me amenable to clear my public character, and even to do so before a Council of Honour, of which the friends of those honourable gentlemen must form part? I have done with Mr. Charles Bradlaugh, and leave him to all the comforts he may derive from the quiet contemplation of his own self. I am, Sir, Yours obediently,
Works Frederick Karl Marx 1872