On page 124 of my Herr Vogt I state in a footnote: The "President of Mankind" deigns to add: "Liebknecht," continues Bernhard Becker, "is now systematically working on Countess Hatzfeldt, to whom Marx, too, sends telegrams and letters in order to turn her against the Association." Herr Bernhard Becker imagines that I take the importance he acquired by bequest quite as "systematically" seriously as he does himself! My letters to Countess Hatzfeldt after the death of Lassalle consisted of a message of condolence, of answers to various questions put to me on account of the planned Lassalle brochure and of discussions on a refutation against a libeller of Lassalle that I had been requested to, and subsequently did, undertake. So as to avoid misunderstandings, however, I thought it very much to the point to remind the Countess in a letter of December 22, 1864 that I did not agree with Lassalle's politics. That concluded our correspondence, in which not a syllable was uttered about the Association. The Countess had requested me among other things to let her know by return whether the release of certain portraits for the planned brochure seemed appropriate to me. I replied by telegraph: No! This single telegram is put into the plural by Herr Bernhard Becker, who is no less eminent a grammarian than he is poet and thinker. He relates that I also took part in a campaign directed against him at a later date. The sole step on my part in this all-important affair was this: I had heard from Berlin that Bernhard Becker was being persecuted from a certain quarter because he was not willing to allow the Social-Demokrat and the Association to be misused in order to agitate for the incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein into Prussia. At the same time I had been asked to bring this "intrigue" to the notice of Herr Klings in Solingen, over whom a certain degree of influence was attributed to me on account of some earlier contacts, and Herr Philipp Becker in Geneva, in order to give them due warning. I did both things, the former through a Barmen friend, the latter through my friend Schily in Paris, who was labouring, as I was, under the delusion that something human had happened to the "President of Mankind" and that he had actually behaved decently for once. He now naturally distorts the facts of the matter into the exact opposite -- being a dialectician. The "President of Mankind" is, however, not only an eminent writer, thinker, grammarian and dialectician. He is a pathologist of the first water, to boot. My eighteen-month-old carbuncle complaint, which happened to last six months after Lassalle's death, this blood-red disease he explains as due to "pale envy at Lassalle's greatness". Herr Bernhard Becker's gift for discrimination obviously provides support for his power of reasoning. His association, he boasts, comprised all of "400 men" in its heyday, while our Association shows so little modesty that it already numbers 10,000 members in England alone. It is, in fact, impermissible that anything of this sort should take place behind the back as it were of the "President of Mankind". All in all, and with particular respect to Herr Bernhard Becker's abundance of abilities only briefly suggested by me, one finds that he is hardly justified in his complaints that people have sought to impose too much at once on a man like him; that people have not only forced on him the job of exercising autocratic power as his main field, but also the lesser office of "buying eggs and butter for the house", "on the side". It would seem, however, that a better domestic order could be achieved by re-arranging his dual functions. May his main task in future be the "buying of eggs and butter for the house", and, conversely, let him preside over mankind solely "on the side".
The International Workingmen's Association, The 'President of Mankind'