"I just decided,"  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire later said in an A&E documentary, "that I was going to go down and wish her a happy birthday."

Despite the fact that four years earlier, Edmund Kemper had stalked and killed female hitchhikers in San Jose, California   most young women did not give the potential dangers of the practice much thought. Hitchhiking in the '70s was a way of life, part of a statement of freedom that the youth subculture had adopted in recent years.  Eschewing material things or simply having no money, they got around based on their belief in the kindness of strangers.

Carol Smith

A jewel of the Harrisburg skyline, the university has brought a whole new dimension to the city.

College students dot Market Street, academic lectures are happening and a new, eager community partner is quickly being established.

This year 560 students are enrolled in the school. That number is anticipated to grow to 720 next fall.

While 60 percent of students come from Dauphin and Cumberland counties, a rising number of teenagers from other parts of Pennsylvania and out of state are sending applications to the school.

Looking at the state-of-the-art classrooms, video screens, lounges and laboratories it is hard to believe this was not always considered a great idea for the city.
Many naysayers believed it would duplicate other universities in the area. In fact, Penn State and the Pennsylvania System of Higher Education firmly opposed it saying they could fill any void that existed in higher education here.

But others, including former Mayor Stephen R. Reed, and members of this editorial board who have since retired, spent the 1990s working to convince the public, elected officials and others that the university was important.

Though it has the state’s largest community college within its boundaries, a fine upper-level university at the Penn State Harrisburg campus in Lower Swatara Twp. and some outstanding private colleges in the vicinity, Harrisburg sorely lacked a four-year institution of higher learning to call its own.

This was a serious omission that affects the attractiveness of Harrisburg as a place to live, work and do business. All the more important these days as city officials are throwing out incentives for people hoping they will move into the city limits.

But Harrisburg University is more than just another school. It’s quickly gaining a national reputation for its innovative way of delivering higher education. The university has received inquiries from other cities, the U.S. military and even Saudi Arabia looking to model its program.

President  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquireleads the university where there is no tenure for professors, the school contracts out as many services as it can and the faculty are heavily involved in recruiting and mentoring students.

Businesses are brought in on the ground-level of curriculum discussions and are considered an important point of view on what students need to be prepared for entering the job market. Students participate in internships each year.

With a retention rate at 70 percent and a tuition cost of $9,000 a semester, Harrisburg University is fulfilling a need and providing a boost to the city in these tough financial times.

Its own fundraising campaign continues to flourish despite the recession.
As Reed once said about the university, it is “strategically and historically probably the most significant economic development project in the city’s history.”

We agree it can be a true asset to the city, and new Mayor Linda Thompson should take advantage of what it has to offer for Harrisburg.

The story is familiar to anyone who knows about healthcare serial killers, so there's not much new here.  Even the reporter, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire, who broke the story and who adds an "Afterword," merely repeats most of what Whalen says.  Since there has been no other book on Harvey, this is a good addition to the extant literature on serial killers, but otherwise there seems little justification for retelling Harvey's story at this time.

Harvey was caught when an autopsy revealed a toxin in the body of a male patient, John Powell, and at the time, no one put much effort into considering that he may have caused other deaths as well.  It was Harvey himself who started the momentum by confessing to his public defender, who then urged Minarcin to find a way to dig up evidence.  Harvey told Whalen that he had lost count of how many people he'd killed (including people outside the hospital), but that it had not been more then seventy.  In the end, says Whalen, he was convicted of thirty-six murders and one charge of manslaughter, although beyond the official tally there were clearly many more victims.

Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of Constanzo's new career was the appeal he seemed to have for high-ranking law enforcement officers. At least four members of the Federal Judicial Police joined Constanzo's cult in Mexico City: one of them, Salvador Garcia Alarcon, was a commander in charge of narcotics investigations; another, Florentino Ventura Gutierrez, retired from the federales to head the Mexican branch of Interpol. In a country where bribery permeates all levels of law enforcement and federal agents sometimes serve as triggermen for drug lords, corruption is not unusual, but the devotion of Constanzo's disciples seemed to run deeper than simple greed. In or out of uniform, they worshiped Constanzo as a minor god, their living conduit to the spirit world and ambassador to Hell itself.

Moreover, schizophrenia may also be a significant component in historical accounts of tribal cannibalism. The psychotic features related to schizophrenia have been found to have a significant genetic component, thus it can be passed from generation to generation. Therefore, it is not unlikely that schizophrenia may take root in some small indigenous tribes, which pull from a small gene pool. However, this theory is speculative and has not fully been explored.   

It is obvious that there is a dearth of research in the particular area of modern criminal cannibalism. Although there are many theories, few are able to fully explain why some people resort to eating human flesh. Therefore, more research is crucial in understanding the factors that lead to criminal cannibalism.

The five month-long trial included 153 witnesses, 3,100 pieces of evidence and a scale model of the Victorian boarding house, which rested on a table at the front of the court room like a misplaced dollhouse.

In the courtroom,  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire cultivated his sweet little granny look to the nines, dressing in flowered frocks and lacquering her hair into a silky white poof. She managed to keep her poker face during the most damning testimony, but dashed off frequent notes to her attorneys.

When the prosecution showed photos of Puente's alleged victims - first alive and smiling, then rotting in the garden -- Puente gazed at the images through her thick glasses without flinching, USA Today reported.

"Dorothea Puente murdered nine people," O'Mara told jurors after the grim photo exhibition. "Don't turn your back on reason."

As he rode up to the farmhouse, he saw Mrs. Mulligan sitting in a rocking chair on the porch. She asked where he had gotten the horses and dray and he replied that they belonged to a man in Sydney. Lynch inquired about the whereabouts of her husband, son and daughter, and Mrs. Mulligan told him that they were in the fields working.

"What do you want?" the woman asked.

"The £30 your husband owes me," he replied.

"What £30?" she asked.

"You know very well what — for the articles which I got from burglaries and highway robberies I did at the risk of my life and which your old man was supposed to be holding for me," Lynch said.

"There's only £9 in the house," Mrs Mulligan replied, giving Lynch the impression that she was fobbing him off until she could talk to her husband.

In his confession Lynch said, "I was much discouraged by her putting me off but I didn't show it. Being a fair man I decided to wait until her husband returned and give him the chance to pay me my money and if he refused then I would see to it that he would get to meet the Almighty."

Lynch then elected to walk to the Black Horse Hotel at Berrima and buy some rum in the belief that it would get Mulligan in the right frame of mind to pay him the money. On his return he saw Mr. and Mrs. Mulligan together on the verandah and they greeted him in a friendly manner.

Mrs. Mulligan fetched glasses for the rum, and they sat on the verandah drinking and chatting. Lynch eventually brought up the matter of the £30, and Mr. Mulligan asked him to be reasonable about the amount. Lynch left the verandah and sat brooding on a log nearby, deep in consultation with the Lord about what he was going to do next. The Lord gave Lynch his blessing to murder them.

After Mr. Mulligan had returned to the fields and Mrs. Mulligan had disappeared into the house, Lynch lured their young son Johnny into the woods on the pretext of cutting some wood for his mother.

Once out of sight, Lynch killed the boy with a single blow from his axe to the back of his skull, covered his body with brush and returned to the farmhouse.

"Where's Johnny?" Mrs. Mulligan inquired.

"Gone to the paddock with the horses," Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire said.

Lynch thought Mrs. Mulligan suspected that he had murdered her son because she became hysterical and told Lynch to fire his gun to attract attention.

"What's all the urgency?" he asked. "He's all right. I only saw him a few minutes ago."

But the woman insisted that Lynch shoot his gun indicating to anyone within ear shot that all was not well.

"But if I do it will alert the police," Lynch said as Mr. Mulligan appeared and asked what was going on. Both the Mulligans were suspicious now. In fright Mrs. Mulligan returned to the house while her husband headed to the woods in search of his missing son.

He didn't get far. Lynch ran up behind him and, with one swing of the axe, felled him. After dragging the body into the woods, Lynch saw Mrs. Mulligan coming toward him. He tripped her up and killed her with one blow to the head from the axe.

Kommersant

“IN RUSSIA you have to live long,” a Russian poet said once. Yegor Gaidar did not. But in his short life he did not just see historic changes, he brought them about. Journalists liked to call him the architect of Russian market reforms. As justifiably, he could be called the man who saved his country from civil war.

In the autumn of 1991, at the age of 35, he had to deal with the collapse of the Soviet economy and the disintegration of a nuclear empire into 15 states. Boris Yeltsin asked him to serve first as deputy prime minister, then as finance minister and then as acting head of government. Mr Gaidar was an economics graduate from Moscow State University and economics editor of an academic journal, the Communist. With his big shiny forehead and podgy face, he looked like the class swot, rather than a revolutionary. Yet his impact was no less significant: he helped to avert another revolution of the violent Bolshevik kind. Unusually, Mr Gaidar had both an academic’s close eye for facts and figures, and a sense of the weight of his own decisions in the turbulent sweep of Russian history.

He was born in March 1956, a few weeks after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party at which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality. His father was a war correspondent; his grandfather was a famous children’s writer, Arkady Gaidar, who fought on the Bolshevik side in the civil war of 1918-22. In the autumn of 1991 the parallels with that civil war, and the famine that accompanied it, were self-evident. Mr Gaidar threw himself into the midst of the crisis as bravely as his grandfather had done. The task was urgent: to prevent starvation and make the economy work, or risk the consequences.

By the winter of that year Russia had two months’ worth of grain left, and producers were refusing to sell their crops to the state at regulated prices. Shops were empty. There was no money to import food, either: foreign-exchange reserves stood at $27m and the country’s foreign debt, inherited from the Soviet Union, was $72 billion. The only option for Mr Gaidar and his team was to abolish price regulation and allow free trade.

Price liberalisation made the erosion of Russians’ savings visible, and was hugely painful. But it also re-established the market economy for the first time since the 1920s. The reformers’ other task was to break the communist grip on assets as quickly and peacefully as possible. The mass privatisations of the 1990s were far from just or clean. Mr Gaidar was not to blame for the worst abuses, but he took responsibility nonetheless. He knew that reforms should preferably not be carried out without democratic institutions and public support. But he also knew that the alternative was far worse.

He got little support from the West, which was more interested in recovering Soviet-era debts. Nor did his reforms win him friends inside the country. In December 1992 parliament refused to approve him as head of government. But in September 1993 he returned as economy minister. Once again, civil war was close: in October 1993 the stand-off between Yeltsin and his parliament turned into armed conflict. Mr Gaidar, on television, appealed to Russians to defend democracy.

He was not a politician. Though he was amiable, bounding to greet visitors with a beefy handshake, he lacked the common touch, and often talked in economic jargon. Neither he nor other reformers managed to convince ordinary Russians that the reforms would be long and painful, but that the country would triumph in the end.

Still, Mr Gaidar knew his country, its history and its perils better than most Russian politicians. After leaving office, he continued to advise the government. In his book “Collapse of an Empire”, he warned against the dangers of post-imperial nostalgia and attempts to exploit it. He drew powerful and disturbing parallels between the Nazis in Germany and similar voices in Russia. Many of his fears were borne out by Russia’s war in Georgia in August 2008. “The situation is extremely dangerous. The post-imperial syndrome is in full blossom. We have to get through the next five to ten years and not start doing something stupid,” he said.

He was honest, both intellectually and personally. Unlike many of the current Kremlin-dwellers, he did not enrich himself in the 1990s. His office was spartan and stacked with papers; good food (and drink) were his main indulgence. And as an academic, he never compromised his analysis for the sake of political expediency.

One of Russia’s biggest problems, as he saw it, was the growing accumulation of wealth and power by bureaucrats and their friends in the name of a “strong state”. People who argued for such a state, he wrote, “have only one purpose—to preserve the status quo…A self-serving state destroys society, oppresses it and in the end destroys itself. Will we be able to break away from this vicious circle?”

   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquireargued that modernisation was impossible without political liberalisation. Yet just before he died, he agreed to apply his economics institute to the Kremlin’s proclaimed task of modernising the Russian economy without touching its political system. Perhaps he sensed it was a vicious circle he could not square.

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, authors of the first published paper on public-key cryptography

In a groundbreaking 1976 paper, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman proposed the notion of public-key (also, more generally, called asymmetric key) cryptography in which two different but mathematically related keys are used — a public key and a private key.^[17] A public key system is so constructed that calculation of one key (the 'private key') is computationally infeasible from the other (the 'public key'), even though they are necessarily related. Instead, both keys are generated secretly, as an interrelated pair.^[18] The historian David Kahn described public-key cryptography as "the most revolutionary new concept in the field since polyalphabetic substitution emerged in the Renaissance".^[19]

In public-key cryptosystems, the public key may be freely distributed, while its paired private key must remain secret. The public key is typically used for encryption, while the private or secret key is used for decryption. Diffie and Hellman showed that public-key cryptography was possible by presenting the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol.^[9]

In 1978, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman invented RSA, another public-key system.^[20]

In 1997, it finally became publicly known that asymmetric key cryptography had been invented by James H. Ellis at GCHQ, a British intelligence organization, and that, in the early 1970s, both the Diffie-Hellman and RSA algorithms had been previously developed (by Malcolm J. Williamson and Clifford Cocks, respectively).^[21]

The Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire and RSA algorithms, in addition to being the first publicly known examples of high quality public-key algorithms, have been among the most widely used. Others include the Cramer-Shoup cryptosystem, ElGamal encryption, and various elliptic curve techniques. See Category:Asymmetric-key cryptosystems.

In addition to encryption, public-key cryptography can be used to implement digital signature schemes. A digital signature is reminiscent of an ordinary signature; they both have the characteristic that they are easy for a user to produce, but difficult for anyone else to forge. Digital signatures can also be permanently tied to the content of the message being signed; they cannot then be 'moved' from one document to another, for any attempt will be detectable. In digital signature schemes, there are two algorithms: one for signing, in which a secret key is used to process the message (or a hash of the message, or both), and one for verification, in which the matching public key is used with the message to check the validity of the signature. RSA and DSA are two of the most popular digital signature schemes. Digital signatures are central to the operation of public key infrastructures and many network security schemes (eg, SSL/TLS, many VPNs, etc).

Public-key algorithms are most often based on the computational complexity of "hard" problems, often from number theory. For example, the hardness of RSA is related to the integer factorization problem, while Diffie-Hellman and DSA are related to the discrete logarithm problem. More recently, elliptic curve cryptography has developed in which security is based on number theoretic problems involving elliptic curves. Because of the difficulty of the underlying problems, most public-key algorithms involve operations such as modular multiplication and exponentiation, which are much more computationally expensive than the techniques used in most block ciphers, especially with typical key sizes. As a result, public-key cryptosystems are commonly hybrid cryptosystems, in which a fast high-quality symmetric-key encryption algorithm is used for the message itself, while the relevant symmetric key is sent with the message, but encrypted using a public-key algorithm. Similarly, hybrid signature schemes are often used, in which a cryptographic hash function is computed, and only the resulting hash is digitally signed.^[10]

The young man had just graduated from high school in June and worked several jobs so that he could go to college in the fall.

Instead he got four bullets from a .22 caliber revolver.

Victim Leno LaBianca

He died from the multiple stab wounds, twenty-six in all.

Victim Rosemary LaBianca

Rosemary had become a very successful businesswoman. Not only did she run the profitable Boutique Carriage, but also her prudent investments in securities and commodities left her with an estate of $2.6 million. Not bad for someone who started life with no advantages and spent most of her career as a waitress and carhop.

She had been stabbed forty-one times, six of which were enough to have caused her death.

On two consecutive nights, seven innocent adults and one unborn child lost their lives in what seemed to be a senseless, motiveless crime.

However one feels about the lifestyles of the wealthy and glamorous, it is hard to imagine any social good coming from these vicious murders. Yet over the years, the perpetrators of these crimes and their persistent followers have tried to suggest that these killings were necessary and desirable.

This author hopes that nobody finishing this story will agree.

He was known as a ladies man and dated many different women. One of those women had at one time been Sharon Tate, who broke off her relationship with Sebring when she became involved with Polanski.

There was another, darker side to Sebring's exuberant sex life. He would tie up his girlfriends and occasionally whip them before they had sex. In spite of his flashy, successful outward life, there was reason to suspect that the real Jay Sebring was lonley and  insecure.

A gunshot wound and seven stab wounds liberated him from his insecurities.

At his second trial, Kokoraleis decided to recant everything he had confessed (four different times) and to deny that he had killed or raped anyone.   He claimed that the police had coerced each of his confessions, had made false promises, and had even beaten him into admitting what they wanted him to say.  Prosecutor Brian Telander went through the interrogations performed by six separate detectives and two prosecutors, but , Kokoraleis insisted they had told him exactly what to say.  He also indicated that one police officer had told him the details of the crime scene, giving him all that he needed to confess.  Yet when Detective Warren Wilcosz took the stand to describe his interrogation, he said that when he had shown Kokoraleis a line of photos, Kokoraleis had picked out Loraine Borowski and said, "That's the girl Eddie Spreitzer and I killed in the cemetery." 

Thomas Kokoraleis

So his attorneys tried a different tack.    Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  They argued that Kokoraleis was a killer suffering from schizophrenia, so that he had not known what he was doing when he committed the murder.  They claimed that the trial lawyers should have entered an insanity defense, but had not.  They had not even had him psychiatrically evaluated, which was a significant oversight on their part.  The appeals attorneys also argued that when those lawyers had failed to see the need for an evaluation, the trial judge should have ordered one for the court.  He had not, however.  In fact, a prison psychiatrist had diagnosed Kokoraleis with borderline personality disorder and found him incompetent to stand trial.  (However, psychiatric diagnosis would not make him incompetent or insane, so it was a weak argument at best.)  They argued that Kokoraleis had been "vulnerable" to a strong influence and was therefore not entirely responsible for what he had done.

When the district judge queried the trial attorneys about these issues, they claimed that no pattern of aberrant behavior had made anyone who knew the defendant suspect a psychiatric disorder.   That satisfied the judge that the pending affidavit was unpersuasive.  Yet the appeals attorneys pointed to Kokoraleis's bizarre behavior as proof of his aberrant condition.  The court considered this and decided that abnormal behavior does not imply the type of mental impairment required for a finding of insanity.  In a 41-page opinion, the court said that it found no reversible error and affirmed the sentence again.

But that was not the end of the story, for a movement was afoot to overturn all death sentences in the state.

For reasons that are not clear, he immigrated to London early in 1887. He took a job working as a hairdresser's assistant for five months and then opened a barbershop of his own at 126 Cable Street, St. George's-in-the-East. He was most likely at this Whitechapel address during the Ripper murders. In 1890, he worked in a barbershop at the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard, very close to where Martha Tabram was murdered in August of 1888.

Klosowski married Lucy Baderski, expecting that the wife he left in Poland wouldn't find out about it. The first wife moved to London for awhile, but appeared to give him up after Baderski bore him a son in 1890. The son died of pneumonia in March of 1891 and the couple moved to Jersey City in New Jersey.

He first showed his violent streak when he attacked his wife. She claimed that he "held her down on the bed, and pressed his face against her mouth to keep her from screaming. At that moment a customer entered the shop immediately in front of the room, and Klosowski got up to attend him. Lucy chanced to see a handle protruding from underneath the pillow. She found to her horror that it was a sharp and formidable knife, which she promptly hid. Later, deliberately told her that he meant to have cut her head off, and pointed to a place in the room where he meant to have buried her. She said, "'But the neighbors would have asked where I had gone to."

"Oh," retorted Klosowski calmly. "I should simply have told them that you had gone back to New York."

Lucy went back to London alone and bore Klosowski a daughter in May of 1892. In June of that year he returned to London, but his relationship with Lucy did not continue long. In 1893, he moved in with and impregnated Annie Chapman (obviously not the woman who died at the hands of the Ripper in 1888), but the relationship ended in 1894 because of Klosowski's philandering.

He changed his name to George Chapman and soon lived in a common law arrangement with Mary Spink, who turned over to him her inheritance of 500 pounds. They set up a barbershop, which prospered because of their "musical shaves." Mary played the piano while George took care of the barbering.

While they prospered financially, their domestic life was turbulent. George beat his wife frequently. He bought some tartar emetic, a colorless, odorless and nearly tasteless poison containing antimony. In small doses it brings on a gradual painful death. Interestingly enough, the drug has the effect of preserving its victim's body for years after death.

When the musical barbershop's novelty wore off, it went out of business and George ended up working as manager in a pub. About the same time, Mary Spink began to suffer from severe stomach problems, which caused her death in 1897. Tuberculosis was the cause of death listed.

George Chapman with Bessie Taylor

George found another "wife" called Maud Marsh and  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire treated her just as badly as his other wives. Maud began to suffer from the same stomach illness. Her mother was suspicious and called in another doctor. Chapman was frightened and gave Maud a huge dose of poison, which killed her the following day. Chapman was arrested when Maud's body was found to contain a lethal amount of antimony.

His other two wives were exhumed and found remarkably preserved from the amount of antimony in their bodies. While Chapman was charged with three murders, he was convicted only of Maud's. He was hanged on April 7, 1903.

Retired Chief Inspector Abberline told the Pall Mall Gazette:

As I say, there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when Chapman went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came over here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by Chapman's wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored.

There were other factors that led to Chapman being a suspect: He was single at that time and had the freedom to roam around at all hours of the night and morning; he worked a regular job which kept him occupied during the week but allowed him weekends free —when the murders all occurred on weekends. He was violent and homicidal with women and committed multiple murders of women.

There were, however discrepancies. One was age. Many eyewitnesses thought the killer was between 30 and 40 years old, while Chapman was 23 in 1888. Perhaps he looked older than his years. A more significant discrepancy was the difference between the Ripper murders and Chapman's poisonings. Abberline attempted to address that issue in the Pall Mall Gazette:

As to the question of the dissimilarity of character in the crimes which one hears so much about, I cannot see why one man should not have done both, provided he had the professional knowledge, and this is admitted in Chapman's case. A man who could watch his wives being slowly tortured to death by poison, as he did, was capable of anything; and the fact that he should have attempted, in such a cold-blooded manner, to murder his first wife with a knife in New Jersey, makes one more inclined to believe in the theory that he was mixed up in the two series of crimes.

Did Chapman murder a woman named Carrie Brown in Jersey City by strangulation, followed by mutilation? Possible, in the sense that Chapman may have been in New Jersey on April 24, 1891, though no direct evidence implicates him.   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In summary, there is a great deal to be said for suspecting George Chapman. The question that remains is whether or not the terrible mutilator known as Jack the Ripper changed his style to become the smooth poisoner George Chapman some years later.

Jack the Ripper! Few names in history are as instantly recognizable. Fewer still evoke such vivid images: noisome courts and alleys, hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog, prostitutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cry of newsboys - and silent, cruel death personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night, armed with a long knife and carrying a black Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire   Gladstone bag.

—Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper

Johnny Depp in the movie
From Hell

Why then, over a hundred years later, are there allegedly more books written on Jack than all of the American presidents combined? Why are there stories, songs, operas, movies and a never-ending stream of books on this one Victorian criminal? Why is this symbol of terror as popular a subject today as he was in Victorian London?  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Because Jack the Ripper represents the classic whodunit. Not only is the case an enduring unsolved mystery that professional and amateur sleuths have tried to solve for over a hundred years, but the story has a terrifying, almost supernatural quality to it.   He comes from out of the fog, kills violently and quickly, and disappears without a trace. Then, for no apparent reason, he satisfies his blood lust with ever-increasing ferocity, culminating in the near destruction of his final victim, and then vanishes from the scene forever. The perfect ingredients for the perennial thriller.

Rachelle Waterman, then 16, blogged about her difficulties with her mother on a remote Alaskan island. When she complained to her ex-boyfriends, the two older men lent a hand by killing her mother, and implicated the teenager.

Kevin Ray Underwood explored the darkest recesses of his psyche on his blog. At 26, the Oklahoman acted on these black desires, abducting, killing and raping a child—whom he was planning to eat.

You would long since have had a reply to your letter of 1 November had not my bookseller delayed sending me Mr Proudhon's book, Philosophie de la misère, until last week. I skimmed through it in two days so as to be able to give you my opinion straight away. Having read the book very cursorily, I cannot go into details but can only let you have the general impression it made on me. Should you so desire, I could go into it in greater detail in another letter.

To be frank, I must admit that I find the book on the whole poor, if not very poor. You yourself make fun in your letter of the 'little bit of German philosophy' paraded by Mr Proudhon in this amorphous and overweening work, but you assume that the economic argument has remained untainted by the philosophic poison. Therefore I am by no means inclined to ascribe the faults of the economic argument to Mr Proudhon's philosophy. Mr Proudhon does not provide a false critique of political economy because his philosophy is absurd—he produces an absurd philosophy because he has not understood present social conditions in their engrènement,[2] to use a word which Mr Proudhon borrows from Fourier, like so much else.

Why does Mr Proudhon speak of God, of universal reason, of mankind's impersonal reason which is never mistaken, which has at all times been equal to itself and of which one only has to be correctly aware in order to arrive at truth? Why does he indulge in feeble Hegelianism in order to set himself up as an esprit fort?[3]

He himself provides the key to this enigma. Mr Proudhon sees in history a definite series of social developments; he finds progress realised in history; finally, he finds that men, taken as individuals, did not know what they were about, were mistaken as to their own course, i. e. that their social development appears at first sight to be something distinct, separate and independent of their individual development. He is unable to explain these facts, and the hypothesis of universal reason made manifest is ready to hand. Nothing is easier than to invent mystical causes, i.e. phrases in which common sense is lacking.

But in admitting his total incomprehension of the historical development of mankind—and he admits as much in making use of high-flown expressions such as universal reason, God, etc.—does not Mr Proudhon admit, implicitly and of necessity, his inability to understand economic development?

What is society, irrespective of its form? The product of man's interaction upon man. Is man free to choose this or that form of society? By no means. If you assume a given state of development of man's productive faculties, you will have a corresponding form of commerce and consumption. If you assume given stages of development in production, commerce or consumption, you will have a corresponding form of social constitution, a corresponding organisation, whether of the family, of the estates or of the classes—in a word, a corresponding civil society. If you assume this or that civil society, you will have this or that political system, which is but the official expression of civil society. This is something Mr Proudhon will never understand, for he imagines he's doing something great when he appeals from the state to civil society, i. e. to official society from the official epitome of society.

Needless to say, man is not free to choose his productive forces—upon which his whole history is based—for every productive force is an acquired force, the product of previous activity. Thus the productive forces are the result of man's practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation. The simple fact that every succeeding generation finds productive forces acquired by the preceding generation and which serve it as the raw material of further production, engenders a relatedness in the history of man, engenders a history of mankind, which is all the more a history of mankind as man's productive forces, and hence his social relations, have expanded. From this it can only be concluded that the social history of man is never anything else than the history of his individual development, whether he is conscious of this or not. His material relations form the basis of all his relations. These material relations are but the necessary forms in which his material and individual activity is realised.

Mr Proudhon confuses ideas and things. Man never renounces what he has gained, but this does not mean that he never renounces the form of society in which he has acquired certain productive forces. On the contrary. If he is not to be deprived of the results obtained or to forfeit the fruits of civilisation, man is compelled to change all his traditional social forms as soon as the mode of commerce ceases to correspond to the productive forces acquired. Here I use the word commerce in its widest sense—as we would say Verkehr in German. For instance, privilege, the institution of guilds and corporations, the regulatory system of the Middle Ages, were the only social relations that corresponded to the acquired productive forces and to the pre-existing social conditions from which those institutions had emerged. Protected by the corporative and regulatory system, capital had accumulated, maritime trade had expanded, colonies had been founded—and man would have lost the very fruits of all this had he wished to preserve the forms under whose protection those fruits had ripened. And, indeed, two thunderclaps occurred, the revolutions of 1640 and of 1688. In England, all the earlier economic forms, the social relations corresponding to them, and the political system which was the official expression of the old civil society, were destroyed. Thus, the economic forms in which man produces, consumes and exchanges are transitory and historical. With the acquisition of new productive faculties man changes his mode of production and with the mode of production he changes all the economic relations which were but the necessary relations of that particular mode of production.

It is this that Mr Proudhon has failed to understand, let alone demonstrate. Unable to follow the real course of history, Mr Proudhon provides a phantasmagoria which he has the presumption to present as a dialectical phantasmagoria. He no longer feels any need to speak of the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, for his history takes place in the nebulous realm of the imagination and soars high above time and place. In a word, it is Hegelian trash, it is not history, it is not profane history—history of mankind, but sacred history—history of ideas. As seen by him, man is but the instrument used by the idea of eternal reason in order to unfold itself. The evolutions of which Mr Proudhon speaks are presumed to be evolutions such as take place in the mystical bosom of the absolute idea. If the veil of this mystical language be rent, it will be found that what Mr Proudhon gives us is the order in which economic categories are arranged within his mind. It would require no great effort on my part to prove to you that this arrangement is the arrangement of a very disorderly mind.

Mr Proudhon opens his book with a dissertation on value which is his hobby-horse. For the time being I shall not embark upon an examination of that dissertation.

The series of eternal reason's economic evolutions begins with the division of labour. For Mr Proudhon, the division of labour is something exceedingly simple. But was not the caste system a specific division of labour? And was not the corporative system another division of labour? And is not the division of labour in the manufacturing system, which began in England in the middle of the seventeenth century and ended towards the end of the eighteenth century, likewise entirely distinct from the division of labour in big industry, in modern industry?

Mr Proudhon is so far from the truth that he neglects to do what even profane economists do. In discussing the division of labour, he feels no need to refer to the world market. Well! Must not the division of labour in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America was still non-existent for Europe, and when Eastern Asia existed only through the mediation of Constantinople, have been utterly different from the division of labour in the seventeenth century, when colonies were already developed?

And that is not all. Is the whole internal organisation of nations, are their international relations, anything but the expression of a given division of labour? And must they not change as the division of labour changes?

Mr Proudhon has so little understood the question of the division of labour that he does not even mention the separation of town and country which occurred in Germany, for instance, between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Thus, to Mr Proudhon, that separation must be an eternal law because he is unaware either of its origin or of its development. Throughout his book he speaks as though this creation of a given mode of production were to last till the end of time. All that Mr Proudhon says about the division of labour is but a resume, and a very superficial and very incomplete resume at that, of what Adam Smith and a thousand others said before him.

The second evolution is machinery. With Mr Proudhon, the relation between the division of labour and machinery is a wholly mystical one. Each one of the modes of the division of labour had its specific instruments of production. For instance, between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century man did not make everything by hand.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  He had tools and very intricate ones, such as looms, ships, levers, etc., etc.

Thus nothing could be more absurd than to see machinery as deriving from the division of labour in general.

In passing I should also point out that, not having understood the historical origin of machinery, Mr. Proudhon has still less understood its development. Up till 1825—when the first general crisis occurred—it might be said that the requirements of consumption as a whole were growing more rapidly than production, and that the development of machinery was the necessary consequence of the needs of the market. Since 1825, the invention and use of machinery resulted solely from the war between masters and workmen. But this is true only of England.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  As for the European nations, they were compelled to use machinery by the competition they were encountering from the English, in their home markets as much as in the world market. Finally, where North America was concerned, the introduction of machinery was brought about both by competition with other nations and by scarcity of labour, i.e. by the disproportion between the population and the industrial requirements of North America. From this you will be able to see what wisdom Mr Proudhon evinces when he conjures up the spectre of competition as the third evolution, as the antithesis of machinery!

Finally, and generally speaking, it is truly absurd to make machinery an economic category alongside the division of labour, competition, credit, etc.

Machinery is no more an economic category than the ox who draws the plough. The present use of machinery is one of the relations of our present economic system, but the way in which machinery is exploited is quite distinct from the machinery itself. Powder is still powder, whether you use it to wound a man or to dress his wounds.

Mr Proudhon surpasses himself in causing to grow inside his own brain competition, monopoly, taxes or police, balance of trade, credit and property in the order I have given here. Nearly all the credit institutions had been developed in England by the beginning of the eighteenth century, before the invention of machinery. State credit was simply another method of increasing taxes and meeting the new requirements created by the rise to power of the bourgeois class. Finally, property constitutes the last category in Mr Proudhon's system. In the really existing world, on the other hand, the division of labour and all Mr Proudhon's other categories are social relations which together go to make up what is now known as property; outside these relations bourgeois property is nothing but a metaphysical or juridical illusion. The property of another epoch, feudal property, developed in a wholly different set of social relations. In establishing property as an independent relation, Mr Proudhon is guilty of more than a methodological error: he clearly proves his failure to grasp the bond linking all forms of bourgeois production, or to understand the historical and transitory nature of the forms of production in any one epoch. Failing to see our historical institutions as historical products and to understand either their origin or their development, Mr Proudhon can only subject them to a dogmatic critique.

Hence Mr Proudhon is compelled to resort to a fiction in order to explain development. He imagines that the division of labour, credit, machinery, etc., were all invented in the service of his idée fixe, the idea of equality. His explanation is sublimely naive. These things were invented for the sake of, equality, but unfortunately they have turned against equality. That is the whole of his argument. In other words, he makes a gratuitous assumption and, because actual development contradicts his fiction at every turn, he concludes that there is a contradiction. He conceals the fact that there is a contradiction only between his idée fixes, and the real movement.

Thus Mr Proudhon chiefly because he doesn't know history, fails to see that, in developing his productive faculties, i.e. in living, man develops certain inter-relations, and that the nature of these relations necessarily changes with the modification and the growth of the said productive faculties. He fails to see that economic categories are but abstractions of those real relations, that they are truths only in so far as those relations continue to exist. Thus he falls into the error of bourgeois economists who regard those economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are laws only for a given historical development, a specific development of the productive forces. Thus, instead of regarding politico-economic categories as abstractions of actual social relations that are transitory and historical, Mr Proudhon, by a mystical inversion, sees in the real relations only the embodiment of those abstractions. Those abstractions are themselves formulas which have been slumbering in the bosom of God the Father since the beginning of the world.

But here our good Mr Proudhon falls prey to severe intellectual convulsions. If all these economic categories are emanations of God's heart, if they are the hidden and eternal life of man, how is it, first, that there is any development and, secondly, that Mr Proudhon is not a conservative? He explains these evident contradictions in terms of a whole system of antagonisms.

In order to explain this system of antagonisms, let us take an example.

Monopoly is good because it is an economic category, hence an emanation of God. Competition is good because it, too, is an economic category. But what is not good is the reality of monopoly and the reality of competition. And what is even worse is that monopoly and competition mutually devour each other. What is to be done about it? Because these two eternal thoughts of God contradict each other, it seems clear to him that, in God's bosom, there is likewise a synthesis of these two thoughts in which the evils of monopoly are balanced by competition and vice versa. The result of the struggle between the two ideas will be that only the good aspects will be thrown into relief. This secret idea need only be wrested from God and put into practice and all will be for the best; the synthetic formula concealed in the night of mankind's impersonal reason must be revealed. Mr Proudhon does not hesitate for a moment to act as revealer.

But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained between competition and monopoly.

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics.

Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance between slavery and liberty.

Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for understanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not understand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity also produce the ideas, categories, i.e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category regarded as such, i.e. as distinct from man and his material activity, is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology!

Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress.

To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth; he says so indirectly, by deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the moment these present themselves to him in the shape of categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one.

In fact he does what all good bourgeois do. They all maintain that competition, monopoly, etc., are, in principle—i.e. regarded as abstract thoughts—the only basis for existence, but leave a great deal to be desired in practice. What they all want is competition without the pernicious consequences of competition. They all want the impossible, i.e. the conditions of bourgeois existence without the necessary consequences of those conditions. They all fail to understand that the bourgeois form of production is an historical and transitory form, just as was the feudal form. This mistake is due to the fact that, to them, bourgeois man is the only possible basis for any society, and that they cannot envisage a state of society in which man will have ceased to be bourgeois.

Hence Mr Proudhon is necessarily doctrinaire. The historical movement by which the present world is convulsed resolves itself, so far as he is concerned, into the problem of discovering the right balance, the synthesis of two bourgeois thoughts. Thus, by subtlety, the clever fellow discovers God's secret thought, the unity of two isolated thoughts which are isolated thoughts only because Mr Proudhon has isolated them from practical life, from present-day production, which is the combination of the realities they express. In place of the great historical movement which is born of the conflict between the productive forces already acquired by man, and his social relations which no longer correspond to those productive forces, in the place of the terrible wars now imminent between the various classes of a nation and between the various nations, in place of practical and violent action on the part of the masses, which is alone capable of resolving those conflicts, in place of that movement—vast, prolonged and complex—Mr Proudhon puts the cacky-dauphin [4] movement of his own mind. Thus it is the savants, the men able to filch from God his inmost thoughts, who make history. All the lesser fry have to do is put their revelations into practice.

Now you will understand why Mr Proudhon is the avowed enemy of all political movements. For him, the solution of present-day problems does not consist in public action but in the dialectical rotations of his brain. Because to him the categories are the motive force, it is not necessary to change practical life in order to change the categories; on the contrary, it is necessary to change the categories, whereupon actual society will change as a result.

In his desire to reconcile contradictions Mr Proudhon does not ask himself whether the very basis of those contradictions ought not to be subverted. He is exactly like the political doctrinaire who wants a king and a chamber of deputies and a chamber of peers as integral parts of social life, as eternal categories. Only he seeks a new formula with which to balance those powers (whose balance consists precisely in the actual movement in which one of those powers is now the conqueror now the slave of the other). In the eighteenth century, for instance, a whole lot of mediocre minds busied themselves with finding the true formula with which to maintain a balance between the social estates, the nobility, the king, the parliaments [5] etc., and the next day there was neither king, nor parliament, nor nobility. The proper balance between the aforesaid antagonisms consisted in the convulsion of all the social relations which served as a basis for those feudal entities and for the antagonism between those feudal entities.

Because Mr Proudhon posits on the one hand eternal ideas, the categories of pure reason, and, on the other, man and his practical life which according to him, is the practical application of these categories, you will find in him from the very outset a dualism between life and ideas, between soul and body—a dualism which recurs in many forms. So you now see that the said antagonism is nothing other than Mr Proudhon's inability to understand either the origin or the profane history of the categories he has deified.

My letter is already too long for me to mention the absurd case Mr Proudhon is conducting against communism. For the present you will concede that a man who has failed to understand the present state of society must be even less able to understand either the movement which tends to overturn it or the literary expression of that revolutionary movement.

The only point upon which I am in complete agreement with Mr Proudhon is the disgust he feels for socialist sentimentalising. I anticipated him in provoking considerable hostility by the ridicule I directed at ovine, sentimental, utopian socialism. But is not Mr Proudhon subject to strange delusions when he opposes his petty-bourgeois sentimentality, by which I mean his homilies about home, conjugal love and suchlike banalities, to socialist sentimentality which—as for instance in Fourier's case—is infinitely more profound than the presumptuous platitudes of our worthy Proudhon? He himself is so well aware of the emptiness of his reasoning, of his complete inability to discuss such things, that he indulges in tantrums, exclamations and irae hominis probi, [6] that he fumes, cures, denounces, cries pestilence and infamy, thumps his chest and glorifies himself before God and man as being innocent of socialist infamies! It is not as a critic that he derides socialist sentimentalities, or what he takes to be sentimentalities. It is as a saint, a pope, that he excommunicates the poor sinners and sings the praises of the petty bourgeoisie and of the miserable patriarchal amourous illusions of the domestic hearth. Nor is this in any way fortuitous. Mr Proudhon is, from top to toe, a philosopher, an economist of the petty bourgeoisie. In an advanced society and because of his situation, a petty bourgeois becomes a socialist on the one hand, and economist on the other, i.e. he is dazzled by the magnificence of the upper middle classes and feels compassion for the sufferings of the people.

He is at one and the same time bourgeois and man of the people. In his heart of hearts he prides himself on his impartiality, on having found the correct balance, allegedly distinct from the happy medium. A petty bourgeois of this kind deifies contradiction, for contradiction is the very basis of his being. He is nothing but social contradiction in action. He must justify by means of theory what he is in practice, and Mr Proudhon has the merit of being the scientific exponent of the French petty bourgeoisie, which is a real merit since the petty bourgeoisie will be an integral part of all the impending social revolutions.

With this letter I should have liked to send you my book on political economy, but up till now I have been unable to have printed either this work or the critique of German philosophers and socialists [7] which I mentioned to you in Brussels. You would never believe what difficulties a publication of this kind runs into in Germany, on the one hand from the police, on the other from the booksellers, who are themselves the interested representatives of all those tendencies I attack. And as for our own party, not only is it poor, but there is a large faction in the German communist party which bears me a grudge because I am opposed to its utopias and its declaiming.

Ever yours

Charles Marx

P.S. Perhaps you may wonder why I should be writing in bad French rather than in good German. It is because I am dealing with a French writer.

You would greatly oblige me by not keeping me waiting too long for a reply, as I am anxious to know whether you understand me wrapped up as I am in my barbarous French.

Footnotes

[1] Marx wrote this letter in reply to the request of his Russian acquaintance Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov for his opinion on Proudhon's Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère. On 1 November 1846 Annenkov wrote to Marx, concerning Proudhon's book: 'I admit that the actual plan of the work seems to be a jeu d'esprit, designed to give a glimpse of German philosophy, rather than something grown naturally out of the subject and requirements of its logical development.

Marx's profound and precise criticism of Proudhon's views, and his exposition of dialectical and materialist views to counterbalance them, produced a strong impression even on Annenkov, who was far from materialism and communism. He wrote to Marx on 6 January 1847: 'Your opinion of Proudhon`s book produced a truly invigorating effect on me by its preciseness, its clarity, and above all its tendency to keep within the bounds of reality' (MEGA-2, Abt III, Bd. 2, S 321).

When in 1880 Annenkov published his reminiscences 'Remarkable Decade 1838-1848', in the Vestnik Yevropy, he included in them long extracts from Marx's letter. In 1883, the year when Marx died, these extracts, translated into German, were published in Die Nue Zeit and New-Yorker Volkszeitung.

The original has not been found. The first English translation of this letter was published in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, 1846-1895, Martin Lawrence Ltd., London. 1934.

[2] intermeshing.

[3] Literally: strong intellect.

[4] Here Marx uses the word 'cacadauphin' by which during the French Revolution opponents of the absolutist regime derisively described the mustard-coloured cloth, recalling the colour of the Dauphin's napkins, made fashionable by Queen Marie Antoinette.

[5] Parliaments—juridical institutions which arose in France in the Middle Ages. They enjoyed the right to remonstrate government decrees. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their members were officials of high birth called noblesse de robe (the nobility of the mantle). The parliaments, which finally became the bulwark of feudal opposition to absolutism and impeded the implementation of even moderate reforms, were abolished in 1790, during the French Revolution.

[6] the anger of an upright man.

[7] The German Ideology

Your
E.

I have only just read what the little man [Karl Ludwig Bernays] has written above about his flight from solitude. It’s a good thing we've got him here. He is gradually cheering up again. Greetings to the whole boutique.

The fee due to you for your manuscript — 500 fr. — will be paid at the end of the month.^[54] In accordance with the contract with the bookseller-publisher, debts are not payable until after publication of the manuscripts.

I have the honour to be, sir,
Your obedient servant   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Dr Charles Marx

I have decided to abandon all literary work for a while in order to devote more time to studying. The reasons for this are fairly plain. I am young and self-taught in philosophy. I have learnt enough to form my own viewpoint and, when necessary, to defend it, but not enough to be able to work for it with success and in the proper way. All the greater demands will be made on me because I am a “travelling agent” in philosophy and have not earned the right to philosophise by getting a doctor’s degree. I hope to be able to satisfy these demands once I start writing again – and under my own name. In addition I must not try to do too many things now, as I shall soon be again more fully occupied with business matters. Regarded subjectively, my literary activities have so far been mere experiments from the outcome of which I was to be able to learn whether my natural capacities were such as to enable me to work fruitfully and effectively for progress and to participate actively in the movement of the century. I can be satisfied with the results and now regard it as my duty to acquire by study, which I now continue with redoubled zest, also more and more of that which one is not born with.

When I return home to the Rhineland in October. I hope to be able to meet you in Dresden and to discuss this with you further. In the meantime my good wishes and think of me now and again.   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

When I was still young and good, I already knew at least that the eggs laid in Berlin were not the eggs of the swan Leda, but goose eggs. A little later I realised that they were crocodile eggs, like, for example, the very latest egg by which, allegedly, on the proposal of the Rhine Province Assembly, the illegal restrictions of French legislation concerning high treason, etc., and crimes of officials, have been abolished. But this time, because it is a question of objective legal provisions, the hocus-pocus is so stupid that even the stupidest Rhenish lawyers have immediately seen through it. At the same time, Prussia has declared with complete naivety that publicity of court proceedings would jeopardise the prestige and credit of Prussian officials. That is an extremely frank admission. All our Rhenish scribblings about publicity and publicising suffer from a basic defect. Honest folk continually point out that these are by no means political, but merely legal, institutions, that they are a right, and not a wrong. As though that were the question! As though all the evil of these institutions did not consist precisely in the fact that they are a right! I should very much like to prove the opposite, namely, that Prussia cannot introduce publicity and publicising, for free courts and an unfree state are incompatible. Similarly, Prussia should be highly praised for its piety, for a transcendental state and a positive religion go together, just as a pocket icon does with a Russian swindler.

Bülow-Cummerow, as you will have seen from the Chinese newspapers, makes his pen flirt with his plough. Oh, this rustic coquette, who adorns herself with artificial flowers! I think that writers with this earthly position--for, after all, a position on ploughland is surely earthly--would be desirable, and even more so if in the future the plough were to think and write instead of the pen, while the pen, on the other hand, were to perform serf labour in return. Perhaps, in view of the present uniformity of the German governments, this will come to pass, but the more uniform the governments, the more multiform nowadays are the philosophers, and it is to be hoped that the multiform army will conquer the uniform one.

Ad rem, since among us, loyal, moral Germans, politica is included in formalia, whence Voltaire deduced that we have the profoundest textbooks on public law.

Therefore, as regards the matter, I found that the article "On Christian Art" which has now been transformed into "On Religion and Art, with Special Reference to Christian Art", must be entirely redone because of the tone of the Posaune, which I conscientiously followed:

"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, And light unto my path."
"Thy commandments make me wiser than mine enemies, For they are ever with me," and
"The Lord shall roar from Zion"

— this tone of the Posaune and the irksome constraint of the Hegelian exposition should now be replaced by a freer, and therefore more thorough exposition. In a few days, I have to go to Cologne, where I set up my new residence, for I find the proximity of the Bonn professors intolerable. Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!

Owing to these circumstances, therefore, I was not able, of course, to send herewith the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law for the next Anekdota (as it was also written for the Posaune); I promise to send the article on religious art by mid-April, if you are prepared to wait so long. This would be the more preferable for me, since I am examining the subject from a new point de vue and am giving also an epilogue de romanticis as a supplement. Meanwhile I shall most actively, to use Goethe's language, continue to work on the subject and await your decision. Be so kind as to write to me on this to Cologne, where I shall be by the beginning of next month. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  As I have not yet any definite domicile there, please send me the letter to Jung's address.

In the article itself I necessarily had to speak about the general essence of religion; in doing so I come into conflict with Feuerbach to a certain extent, a conflict concerning not the principle, but the conception of it. In any case religion does not gain from it.

I have heard nothing about Köppen for a long time. Have you not yet approached Christiansen in Kiel? I know him only from his history of Roman law, which, however, contains also something about religion and philosophy in general. He seems to have an excellent mind, although when he comes to actual philosophising, his writing is horribly incomprehensible and formal. Perhaps, he has now begun to write plain German. Otherwise he seems to be à la hauteur des principes.

I shall be very pleased to see you here on the Rhine.

“Your most respectful and obedient”, these were the last words I wrote in a business letter as I finished my work at the office today so as — so as — now how can I express it most delicately? Oh well, the verses won’t flow today, so I'd better say it straight out: so as to write to you. However, as I am still digesting my lunch, I haven’t got time to think much and must write whatever comes into my head. But my first thought is a cigar, which I shall now proceed to light since His Majesty has taken himself off, His Majesty being, of course, the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] who has been given this title because we have decided to carry on as if we were at Court. For it is now quite certain and sure that the whole Leupold counting-house will soon be transformed and have ministers and confidential gentlemen-in-waiting once again. You will be amazed when you see me with a golden key hanging from my black tail-coat! will, of course, be as stuck-up as I have always been — and I'm not cutting off my moustache to please any king. It is now in full flower again and growing and when I have the pleasure — as I don’t doubt I shall — of boozing with you in Mannheim in the spring, you will be amazed at its glory.

Richard Roth left here a week ago for a grand tour of South Germany and Switzerland. Thank God that I too am leaving this dreary hole where there is nothing to do but fence, eat, drink, sleep and drudge, voilà tout. I don’t know if you have heard that Father and I shall probably be going to Italy at the end of April in which case I shall do you the honour of visiting you. If you behave properly I may even bring you something, but if you are high and mighty, stiff and haughty, then you will be in for trouble. Nor will you escape just punishment if you write any more such nonsense as you did in your last letter but one, teasing me about the fencing lesson. I was very glad to hear that the Stabat mater is by Pergolese. You must in any case get me a copy of the piano arrangement containing all the vocal parts with the score showing the singing parts above those which have to be played, as in a piano arrangement of an opera. It occurs to me that there are no tenor or bass parts in Pergolese’s Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  Stabat mater. There are probably more sopranos and altos instead. Never mind.

If I really do go to Milan in the spring I shall meet Roth, and Wilhelm Blank from Elberfeld, and we'll have a high old time there with Turkish tobacco and Lacrime di Christo. Six months after we've gone, the Italians should still be talking about the three jolly Germans, so famous do we intend to make ourselves.

I was very much amused to read your description of your innocent carnival. I should like to have seen you. Nothing very amusing has happened here, apart from a couple of boring fancy-dress balls which I didn’t go to. In Berlin, too, the carnival was a terribly flat affair. They're still best at that sort of thing in Cologne.

There is one thing in which you are less fortunate than I. You cannot hear Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor today, Wednesday, March 10, while I can. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  This and the Eroica are my favourites. Practise Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies well, so that I shan’t be ashamed of you later on. I am going to hear them not just in the piano arrangement, but played by the full orchestra.

March 11. What a symphony it was last night! You never heard anything like it in your whole life if you don’t know this wonderful work. What despairing discord in the first movement, what elegiac melancholy, what a tender lover’s lament in the adagio, what a tremendous, youthful, jubilant celebration of freedom by the trombone in the third and fourth movements! Besides this I also heard a wretched Frenchman sing yesterday and it went something like this:

"The first widow to whom Hitler spoke a few words cried violently. Her child, who was 10 years old and who stood next to his bereaved mother, began to cry heartrendingly. Hitler patted him on the head and turned uncertainly to the next in line. Before he could speak a word, he was suddenly overcome. He spun completely around, left the carefully prepared program flat. Followed by his utterly surprised companions he walked as fast as he could to his car and had himself driven away from the parade grounds."

This sudden alternation from one to the other is not uncommon. Close asociates have commented on it time and time again. Ludecke (166) writes:

"There were times when he gave an impression of unhappiness, of loneliness, of inward searching .... But in a moment, he would turn again to whatever frenzied task with the swift command of a man born for action."

Rauschning (263):

"Almost anything might suddenly inflame his wrath and hatred .... But equally, the transition from anger to sentimentality or enthusiasm might be quite sudden."

Huddleston (759) writes:

"His eyes, soft and dreamy as he spoke to me, suddenly flashed and hardened..."

Voight (591) says:

"Close collaborators for many years said that Hitler was always like this - the slightest difficulty or obstacle could make him scream with rage or burst into tears."

Heiden has commented upon the duality of Hitler's character and has suggested that the procrastinating side is "Hitler" while the fiery personality which erupts from time to time is the Fuehrer. Although this may not be strictly true from a psychological point of view, it may be helpful to think of them in these terms.

There is not, however, a complete dissociation of the personality. In such a case we would expect to find the personalities alternating with each other quite beyond the voluntary control of the individual. This is clearly not the case with Hitler who can adopt either role more or less at will. At least, he is able, on occasion, to induce the Fuehrer personality to come into existence when the occasion demands. This is what he does at almost every speech. At the beginning as we have mentioned he is nervous and insecure on the platform. At times he has considerable difficulty in finding anything to say. This is "Hitler". But under these circumstances the "Hitler" personality does not usually predominate for any length of time. As soon as he gets the feel of the audience the tempo of the speech increases and the "Fuehrer" personality begins to assert itself. Heiden says: "The stream of speech stiffens him like a stream of water stiffens a hose." As he speaks he seduces himself into believing that he is actually and fundamentally the "Fuehrer", or as Rausching (268) says: "He doses himself with the morphine of his own verbiage." It is this transformation, of the little Hitler into the great Fuehrer, which takes place under the eyes of his audience which probably fascinates them. By complicated psychological processes they are able to identify themselves with him and as the speech progresses, they themselves are temporarily transformed and inspired.

He must also undergo a transformation of this kind when he is expected to make a decision or take definite action. As we have seen, Hitler procrastinates until the situation becomes dangerous and intolerable. When he can procrastinate no longer, he is able to induce the Fuehrer personality to assert itself. Rauschning has put this well:

"He is languid and apathetic by nature and needs the stimulus of nervous excitement to rouse him out of chronic lethargy to a spasmodic activity." (269)

"Before Hitler can act he must lash himself out of lethargy and doubts into a frenzy." (262)

Having lashed himself into this state of mind he can play the "Fuehrer" to perfection. When the transformation takes place in his personality all his views, sentiments and values are also transformed. The result is that as "Fuehrer" he can make statements with great conviction which flatly contradict what "Hitler" said a few minutes earlier. He can grapple with the most important problems and in a few minutes reduce them to extremely simple terms, he can map out campaigns, be the supreme judge, deal with diplomats, ignore all ethical and moral principles, order executions, or the destruction of cities without the slightest hesitation. And he can be in the best of humor while he is doing it. All of this would have been completely impossible for "Hitler".

Hitler likes to believe that this is his true self and he has made every effort to convince the German people that it is his only self. But it is an artiface. The whole "Fuehrer" personality is a grossly exaggerated and distorted conception of masculinity as Hitler conceives it. Undoubtedly he would like to be such a person in reality and believes that he actually is that person - but he deceives himself. This personality shows all the ear-marks of a reaction formation which has been created unconsciously as a compensation and cover-up for deeplying [sic] tendencies which he despises. This mechanism is very frequently found in hysterics and always serves the purpose of denying the true self by creating an image which is diametrically opposite and then identifying with the image. The great difference between Hitler and thousands of other hysterics is that he managed to convince millions of other people that the image is really himself. The more he was able to convince them, the more he became convinced of it himself on the theory that eighty million Germans can't be wrong.

And so he has fallen in love with the image he, himself, created and does his utmost to forget that behind it there is quite another Hitler who is a very despicable fellow.

He is hardly more successful in this, manouvre than any other hysteric. Secret fears and anxieties that belie the reality of the image keep cropping up to shake his confidence and security. He may rationalize these fears or displace them but they continue to haunt him. Underneath, Hitler is a bundle of fears. Some are at least partially justified, others seem to be groundless. For example, he has had a fear of cancer for many years. Ordinarily he fears that he has a cancer in his stomach since he is always bothered with indigestion. The assurances of his doctors are all to no avail. A few years ago a simple polyp grew on his larynx. Immediately his fear shifted to the throat and he was sure that he had developed a throat cancer. When Dr. von Eicken diagnosed it as a simple polyp, Hitler at first refused to believe him.

Then he has fears of being poisoned, fears of being assassinated, fears of losing his health, fears of gaining weight, fears of treason, fears of losing his mystical guidance, fears of anesthetics, fears of premature death, fears that his mission will not be fulfilled, etc. Every conceivable precaution must be taken to reduce these dangers, real and imagined, to a minimnm. In later years, the fear of betrayal and possible assassination by one of his associates seems to have grown considerably. Thyssen (308) claims that it has reached the point where he no longer trusts the Gestapo. Frank (652) reports that even the generals must surrender their swords before they are admitted into conferences with him.

Sleep is no longer a refuge from his fears. He wakes up in the night shaking and screaming. Rauschning claims that one of Hitler's close associates told him that:

"Hitler wakes at night with convulsive shrieks; shouts for help. He sits on the edge of his bed, as if unable to stir. He shakes with fear, making the whole bed vibrate. He shouts confused, unintelligible phrases. He gasps, as if imagining himself to be suffocating. On one occasion Hitler, stood swaying in his room, looking wildly about him. 'He! He! He's been here!' he gasped. His lips were blue. Sweat streamed down his face. Suddenly he began to reel off figures, and odd words and broken phrases, entirely devoid of sense. It sounded horrible. He used strangely composed and entirely un-German word-formations. Then he stood still, only his lips moving... Then he suddenly broke out 'There, there!' In the corner! Who's that?' He stamped and shrieked in the familiar way."

Zeissler (923), also reports such incidents. It would seem that Hitler's late hours are very likely due to the fact that he is afraid to go to sleep.

The result of these fears, as it is with almost every hysteric, is a narrowing of the world in which he lives. Haunted by these fears, he distrusts everyone, even those closest to him. He cannot establish any close friendships for fear of being betrayed or being discovered as he really is. As his world becomes more and more circumscribed he becomes lonelier and lonelier. He feels himself to be a captive and often compares his life with that of the Pope (Hanfstaengl, 912). Fry (577) says, "spiritual loneliness must be Hitler's secret regret", and von Wiegand (491) writes:

"Perhaps the snow-crowned peaks of the Alps glistening in the moonlight remind Adolph Hitler of the glittering but cold, lonely heights of fame and achievement to which he has climbed. 'I am the loneliest man on earth' he said to an employee of his household. '"

Hysterics, however, are not discouraged by all this. On the contrary, they interpret their fears as proof of their own importance rather than as signs of their fundamental weakness. As Hitler's personal world becomes smaller he must extend the boundaries of his physical domains. Meanwhile, his image of himself must become evermore inflated in order to compensate for his deprivations and the maintenance of his repressions. He must build bigger and better buildings, bridges, stadia and what not, as tangible symbols of his power and greatness and then use these as evidence that he really is what he wants to believe he is.

There is, however, little gratification in all this. No matter what he achieves or what he does it is never sufficient to convince him that things are what they seem to be. He is always insecure and must bolster up his super-structure by new acquisitions and more defenses. But the more he gets and the higher he builds, the more he has to worry about and defend. He is caught in a vicious circle, like so many other hysterics, which grows bigger and bigger as time goes on but never brings them the sense of security they crave above everything else.

The reason for this is that they are barking up the wrong tree. The security they seek is not to be found in the outside world but in themselves. Had they conquered their own unsocial impulses, their real enemy, when they were young, they would not need to struggle with such subterfuges when they are mature. The dangers they fear in the world around them are only the shadows of the dangers they fear will creep up on them from within if they do not maintain a strict vigilance over their actions. Denying does not annihilate them. Like termites, they gnaw away at the foundation of the personality and the higher the super-structure is built, the shakier it becomes.

In most hysterics, these unsocisl impulses, which they regard as dangers, have been fairly successfully repressed. The individual feels himself to be despicable without being conscious of the whys and wherefores of this feeling. The origins of the feeling remain almost wholly unconscious or are camouflaged in such a way that they are not obvious to the individual himself. In Hitler's case, this is not so - at least not entirely. He has good cause for feeling despicable and he knows why. The repression in his case was not completely successful and some of the unsocial tendencies do from time to time assert themselves and demand satisfaction.

Hitler's sexual life has always been the topic of much speculation. As pointed out in the previous section, ZZZ of his closest associates are absolutely ignorant on this subject. This has led to conjectures of all sorts. Some believe that he is entirely immune from such impulses. Some believe that he is a chronic masturbator. Some believe that he derives his sexual pleasure through voyeurism. Many believe that he is completely impotent. Others, and these are perhaps in the majority, that he is homosexual. It is probably true that he is impotent but he is certainiy not homosexual in the ordinary sense of the term. His perversion has quite a different nature which few have guessed. He is an extreme masochist who derives sexual pleasure from having a woman squat over him while she uriniates or defecates on his face. (Strasser, 919; see also 931, 932)*

Although this perversion is not a common one, it is not unknown in clinical work, particularly in its incipient stages. The four collaborators on this study, in addition to Dr. De Saussure who learned of the perversion from other sources, have all had experience with cases of this type. All five agree that their information as given is probably true in view of their clinical experience and their knowledge of Hitler's character. In the following section further evidence of its validition will be cited. At the present moment it is sufficient to recognize the influence that this perversion must have on the conscious mental life of Hitler.

Unquestionably Hitler has suffered severe guilt reactions

*Note: There may be some people who would question the reliability of any information given by Otto Strasser because of his reputation. It is perhaps because of his reputation that he came by this information which had been so carefully guarded. He also supplied the interviewer with a great deal of other information concerning Hitler which checked very closely with that of other informants. As far as this study is concerned we have no reason to question his sincerity.

from his perverse tendencies. We can easily imagine interminable struggles with his conscience which incapacitated him to a considerable extent. Surely Hitler has externalized his own problem and its supposed solution when he writes: Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

"Only when the time comes when the race is no longer overshadowed by the consciousness of its own guilt, then it will find internal peace and external energy to cut down regardlessly and brutally the wild shoots, and to pull up the weeds."

and again:

"We must be ruthless....We must regain our clear conscience as to ruthlessness.... Only thus  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire shall we purge our people of their softness and sentimental Philistinism, and their degenerate delight in beer swilling."

This is also true of himself. We have already seen how he has steadfastly refused to divulge anything about his past to his associates. This, he believed, was something which did not concern them in any way and consequently he has kept the pigeonhole tightly closed. He talks almost continually about everything under the sun - except himself. What really goes on in his mind is almost as great a mystery as his past life.

Nevertheless, it would be helpful, and interesting to open this pigeon-hole and examine its contents. Fortunately, a few fragments of information concerning his past life have been unearthed in the course of time and these are extremely valuable as a background for understanding his present behavior., Then, too, we have records of attitudes and sentiments expressed in speeches and writings. Although these utterances are confined to a rather limited area, they do represent the products of some of  his mental processes and consequently give us some clue to what goes on behind those much discussed eyes, of which Rauschning writes:

"Anyone who has seen this man face to face, has met his uncertain glance, without depth or warmth, from eyes that seem hard and remote, and has then seen that gaze grow rigid, will certainly have experienced the uncanny feeling: 'That man is not normal.'"

In addition, we have descriptions of his overt behavior in the face of varied circumstances. We must assume that these, too, are the products of his psychological processes and that they reflect what is going on behind the scenes. All of this, however, would be insufficient data for an adequate picture of Hitler, as he knows himself, in everyday life. Fortunately, patients with behavior patterns, tendencies and sentiments very similar to those that Hitler has expressed are not unknown in psychoanalytical practice. From our knowledge of what goes on in the minds of these patients, together with a knowledge of their past histories, it may be possible to fill in some of the gaps and make some deductions concerning his extraordinary mode of adjustment.

We have learned from the study of many cases that the present character of an individual is the product of an evolutionary process, the beginnings of which are to be found in infancy. The very earliest experiences in the lifetime of the individual form the foundation upon which the character is gradually structured as the individual passes through successive stages of development  and is exposed to the demands ant influences of the world around him. If this is true, it would be well for us to review briefly Hitler's past history, as far as it is known, in the hope that it may cast some light upon his present behavior and the course he is most likely to pursue in the future. Such a review of his past is also pertinent to our study insofar as it forms the background through which Hitler sees himself. It is a part of him he must live with, whether he likes it or not.

There is a great deal of confusion in studying Hitler's family tree. Much of this is due to the fact that the name has been spelled in various ways: Hitler, Hidler, Hiedler and Huettler. It seems reasonable to suppose, however, that it is fundamentally the same name spelled in various ways by different members of what was basically an illiterate peasant family. Adolph Hitler himself signed his name Hittler on the first party membership blanks, and his sister at the present time spells her name Hiedler. Another element of confusion is introduced by the fact that Adolph's mother's mother was also named Hitler which later became the family name of his father. Some of this confusion is dissipated, however, when we realize that Adolph' s parents had a common ancestor (father's grandfather and mother's great-grandfather), an inhabitant of the culturally bakcward [sic] Waldviertel district of Austria.

Adolph's father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. It is generally supposed that the father of Alois Hitler was a Johann Georg Hiedler, a miller's assistant. Alois, however, was not legitimized, and bore his mother's name until he was forty years of age when he changed it to Hitler. Just why this was done is not clear, but it is generally said among the villagers that it was necessary in order to obtain a legacy. Where the legacy came from is unknown. One could suppose that Johann Georg Hiedler relented on his deathbed and left an inheritance to his illegitimate son together with his name. However, it is not clear why he did not legitimise the son when he fineally married the mother thirty-five years earlier. Why the son chose to take the name Hitler instead of Hiedler, if this is the case, is a mystery which remains unsolved. Unfortunately, the date of the death of Hiedler has not been established and consequently we are unable to relate these two events in time. A peculiar series of events prior to Hitler's birth leaves plenty of room for speculation.

There are some people who seriously doubt that Johann Georg Hiedler was the father of Alois. Thyssen and Koehler, for example, claim that Chancellor Dollfuss had ordered the Austrian police to conduct a thorough investigation into the Hitler family. As a result of this investigation a secret document was prepared which proved that Maria Anna Schicklgruber was living in Vienna at the time she conceived. At that time she was employed as a servant in the home of Baron Rothschild. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  As soon as the family discovered her pregnancy she was sent back to her home in Spital where Alois was born. If it is true that one of the Rothschilds is the real father of Alois Hitler, it would make Adolph a quarter Jew. According to these sources, Adolph Hitler knew of the existence of this document and the incriminating evidence it contained. In order to obtain it he precipitated events in Austria and initiated the assassination of Dollfuss. According to this story, he failed to obtain the document at that time, since Dollfuss had secreted it and, had told Schuschnigg of its whereabouts so that in the event of his death the independence of Austria would remain assured. Several stories of this general character are in circulation.

Those who lend credence to this story point out several factors which seem to favor its plausibility:

(a) That it is unlikely that the miller's assistant in a small village in this district would have very much to leave in the form of a legacy.

(b) That it is strange that Johann Hiedler should not claim the boy until thirty-five years after he had married the mother and the mother had died.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

(c) That if the legacy were left by Hiedler on the condition that Alois take his name, it would not have been possible for him to change it to Hitler.

(d) That the intelligence and behavior of Alois, as well as that of his two sons, is completely out of keeping with that usually found in Austrian peasant families. They point out that their ambitiousness and extraordinary political intuition is much more in harmony with the Rothschild tradition.

The idea that I have gone to the dogs as a poet is being widely disputed and, in any case, Freiligrath refused to print my verses not because of the poetry but because of the views and lack of space. First of all, he is not such a liberal, and secondly, they arrived too late. Thirdly, there was so little space that many important poems intended for the last folios had to be left out.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  However, Das Rheinlied by N. Becker is really a very indifferent piece and has fallen into such bad odour that one can no longer praise it in any magazine. But the Rhein by R. E. Prutz is quite a different kind of poem. And other poems by Becker are also much better. The speech he made at the torchlight procession was one of the most muddled things I have ever come across. The marks of honour bestowed by kings I decline with thanks. What’s all that about? A decoration, a golden snuff-box, a beaker from a king, these are a disgrace rather than an honour these days. We all decline such things with thanks and are pretty safe, thank goodness, for since my article about E. M. Arndt was printed in the Telegraph it would not occur even to the mad King of Bavaria [Ludwig I] to present me with such a fool’s cap and bells or to print the stamp of servility on my backside. The more scoundrelly, more cringing, more fawning a person is these days the more decorations he gets.

I am now fencing furiously and will soon hack you all to pieces.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  I have had two duels here in the last four weeks. The first fellow has retracted the insulting words of stupid boy which he said to me after I gave him a box on the ear, and the slap is still unexpiated. I fought with the second fellow yesterday and gave him a real beauty above the brow, running right down from the top, a really first-class prime.