Page:Das Kapital (Moore, 1906).pdf/41

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Editor's Preface to the Fourth German Edition.
35

upon accurate terms, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property."

In other words, Gladstone says here that he would be sorry if things were that way, but they are. This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property. And so far as the quasi official Hansard is concerned, Marx continues: "In the subsequent manipulation of his speech for publication Mr. Gladstone was wise enough to eliminate a passage, which was so compromising in the mouth of an English Lord of the Exchequer as that one. By the way, this is an established custom in English parliament, and not by any means a discovery made by Lasker to cheat Bebel."

The anonymous writer then became still madder. Pushing aside his second-hand sources in his reply in the Concordia, July 4, he modestly hints, that it is the "custom" to quote parliamentarian speeches from the official reports; that the report of the Times (which contained the added lie) "was materially identical" with that of Hansard (which did not contain it); that the report of the Times even said "just the reverse of what that notorious passage of the Inaugural Address implied." Of course, our anonymous friend keeps still about the fact that the report of the Times does not only contain "just the reverse," but also "that notorious passage"! Nevertheless he feels that he has been nailed down, and that only a new trick can save him. Hence he decorates his article, full of "insolent mendacity," until it bristles with pretty epithets, such as "bad faith," "dishonesty," "mendacious assertion," "that lying quotation," "insolent mendacity," "a completely spurious quotation," "this falsification," "simply infamous," etc., and he finds himself compelled to shift the discussion to another ground, promising "to explain in a second article, what interpretation we [the "veracious" anonymous] place upon the meaning of Gladstone's words." As