Page:Das Kapital (Moore, 1906).pdf/43

Rh "What seems very queer," says the mannikin of Trinity College, "is that it remained for professor Brentano (then in Breslau, now in Strasburg) … to lay bare the bad faith, which had apparently dictated that quotation from Gladstone's speech in the Inaugural Address. Mr. Karl Marx, who … tried to justify his quotation, had the temerity, in the deadly shifts to which Brentano's masterly attacks quickly reduced him, to claim that Mr. Gladstone tampered with the report of his speech in the Times of April 17, 1863, before it was published in Hansard, in order to eliminate a passage which was, indeed, compromising for the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Brentano demonstrated by a detailed comparison of the texts, that the reports of the Times and of Hansard agreed to the absolute exclusion of the meaning, impugned to Gladstone's words by a craftily isolated quotation, Marx retreated under the excuse of having no time."

This, then, was the kernel of the walnut! And such was the glorious reflex of Brentano's anonymous campaign, in the Concordia, in the coöperative imagination of Cambridge! Thus he lay, and thus he handled his blade in his "masterly attack," this Saint George of the German Manufacturers' Association, while the fiery dragon Marx quickly expired under his feet "in deadly shifts!"

However, this Ariostian description of the struggle serves only to cover up the shifts of our Saint George. There is no longer any mention of "added lies," of "falsification," but merely of "a craftily isolated quotation." The whole question had been shifted, and Saint George and his Cambridge Knight knew very well the reason.

Eleanor Marx replied in the monthly magazine To-Day, February, 1884, because the Times refused to print her statements. She reduced the discussion to the only point, which was in question, namely: Was that sentence a lie added by