Colloqui di Hyndman con Marx: è importante conoscere bene la storia del proprio paese

“Marx’s health was now failing. His more than Herculean labours on his great book had sapped his marvellously strong constitution. No wonder. He would be at the British Museum when the doors opened in the morning and would leave only when they closed at night. Then, after his return home, he would again work on, giving himself only a short rest and time for food, until the early hours of the morning. Sixteen hours a day was quite an ordinary day’s work for him, and not unfrequently he put in an hour or two more. And such work as it was too! It was not surprising that he was now forbidden to do any writing or thinking after his evening meal. This was a serious privation to him but it gave me for a few months the opportunity of calling upon him, when I knew he would be disengaged, and of learning from him more directly and more personally than I could have done in any other way. Thus it came about that, at the close of 1880 and frequent conversations with the Doctor, and gained a view of himself and his genius, his vast erudition and his masterly survey of human life which I think was accessible to very few outside his immediate family circle. Our method of talking was peculiar. Marx had a habit when at all interested in the discussion of walking actively up and down the room, as if he were pacing the deck of a schooner for exercise. (…) I frequently spoke with him about the Chartist movement, whose leaders he had known well and by whom, as their writings show, he was greatly esteemed. He was entirely sympathetic with my idea of reviving the Chartist organisation, but doubted its possibility; and when speaking of the likelihood of bringing about a great economic and social transformation in Great Britain politically and peacefully he said: “England is the one country in which a peaceful revolution is possible; but”, he added after a pause, “history does not tell us so”. “You English”, he said on another occasion, “like the Romans in many things are most like them in your ignorance of your own history”” [Henry Mayers Hyndman, ‘The Record of an Adventurous Life’, London, 1911]