Wilhelm Liebknecht 1896

Karl Marx: Biographical memoirs

First published: in German, 1896;

First English translation, Ernest Untermann, 1901;

Source: Journeyman Press, London, reprint, 1975;

Transcribed: by Steve Painter,

Translator’s note: In my translation I have endeavoured to preserve as much of the delightful freshness and racy strength of Liebknecht’s style as I could without doing violence to the spirit of the English language. If I have succeeded in saving enough of the charm of the original to make the reader forget that he is reading a translation I shall be well rewarded for my exertions. For I shall then feel that the English-speaking comrades, while coming closer to Marx through Liebknecht, are brought nearer to Liebknecht by me. What better recompense could I find?

E. Untermann,

December 1900

Author’s preface

“Better is the enemy of good” is an old commonplace, but like most commonplaces, it nevertheless contains a truth, behind which I retire for shelter in presenting the following little book. A hundred times I have been asked to write about Marx and my personal relations to him, but I have always declined to do so. And declined from – how shall I call it? – a certain holy awe – or how shall I express myself more correctly? – from reverence of Marx. Noblesse oblige. And a Marx imposes weighty obligations. Could I do him justice? Had I the ability? Had I the time? Under the continually growing pressure of work I was condemned to haste, to superficial working. And a eulogistic daubery, with Marx for its object, that would be an insulting lack of respect.

But I was being pressed harder and harder; my hesitation was met by the arguments that a quickly executed sketch need not necessarily be a eulogistic daubery; that I should be able to say a good many things about and of Marx that nobody else could say; that anything bringing Marx nearer to our workers, to our party, would be valuable; and that in a case where there was only a choice between an incomplete publication of the sort that I alone could offer, or non-publication of what I was able to say, the former surely deserved preference – even though it were only the lesser of two evils.

And finally, I had to admit this myself. In the meantime, Engels also has died; the only one who was associated nearly as much and as intimately as myself with Marx, the man and his family, during the London exile up to the beginning of the 1860s. From the summer of 1850 until the beginning of the year 1862, when I felt a longing to return to Germany, I was almost daily and for years nearly all day in the house of Marx, forming a part of his family. Of course, many others besides myself found admission there. For naturally the house of Marx – consisting before he moved into the cottage of Maitland Park Road, of a modest floor in modest Dean Street, Soho Square – was a pigeon loft, where a multitude of various Bohemian, fugitive and refugee folk went in and out, little, great and greatest animals. It was furthermore the natural centre of all settled comrades. True, a settled abode was a very elusive possibility. In London it was extremely difficult to obtain a secure livelihood, and the hunger drove most of the fugitives into the country or to America, providing it did not make short work by giving to the poor devil of a fugitive, if not an abode, at least a permanent place in a London graveyard. I lived through it, and I was, with the exception of the faithful Lessner and the no less faithful Lochner, who, however, could only come less frequently, the only one of the London “community” who, during the whole time – with only a short interruption to be mentioned later in the sketches – frequented the house of Mohr[1] (negro) – the nickname of Marx – like a member of the family. Under these circumstances, one cannot help learning and seeing more than others.

Marx, the man of science, the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (Journal of the Rhine), one of the founders of the Deutsch-Franzoesischen Jahrbuecher (German-French Annals), one of the authors of the Communist Manifesto, the creator of Capital – this Marx belongs to publicity, he stands forth before the whole world, the target of criticism, challenging critique, not hiding the smallest wrinkle to the searching eye – were I to attempt writing about this Marx, then I should be guilty of a reckless imprudence indeed, for that is not feasible in the short minutes I can filch and wrest from the unavoidable work of the day and the hour. Such a task requires scientific penetration, and whence take the time necessary for it? Once, indeed, I had the fond craze – I came near saying craziness – that a life of science could be united to a life of strife, and I designed far-reaching plans; but soon I learned that we cannot serve two masters, nor two mistresses either, and politics is a very exacting mistress, who abides no other gods near herself. I had to choose either the one or the other, and those fond projects dissolved like misty phantoms. And that choice was surely the hardest I was ever called upon to make in my life! Even to this day I have moments of remorse.

Marx also had to choose. It was after the downfall of the commune, and the International Workingmen’s Association, which he had called into existence, claimed so much of his strength that his scientific work suffered in consequence. The perfection of his main work, the work of his life, was out of the question if he remained in the leadership of the International Workingmen’s Association. He had to come to a decision, and he resigned the leadership of the International Workingmen’s Association that in its old form had really fulfilled its mission and could not yet assume at that time the greater, wider, world-encircling form it has now. Since a dissolution of the IWA would have had the appearance of a cowardly retreat and whereas the association, deprived of all opportunity for glorious action by the condition of the times, was in danger of being degraded into a hotbed for paltry and low intrigues, it was decided in 1872, at the Congress of the Hague, to remove it to the United States of North America, where there was no danger of such unworthy practices defiling the high goal. I was really not at all satisfied with this cure suggestive of Dr Eisenbart – together with Bebel I was at that period serving a term in Hubertusburg – but later I gained the conviction that this decision had been a necessity for Marx, and without Marx at the head, the IWA could not remain in Europe.

I shall not, then, treat in these sketches, except in the biographic sketch, the Marx of science and the Marx of politics, or I shall at the most throw passing sidelights on him. The picture of this Marx stands clearly forth for everybody; I shall try to reproduce Marx the man as I have come to know him.

And I believe, even If am but able to do this incompletely, piece by piece, incoherently and hastily, that it will still be better than not doing it at all. And this gives me the courage to drive off the thought of something better I cannot realise, try as best I may, and to give that which I can give. Even if it is not good, it is at least better that I should give it, instead of keeping this little contribution to the drawing of a complete picture of Marx buried in my memory.

And finally, is it not a duty as well I am fulfilling?

* * *

Marx is such a man of science as has not been produced a second time by this century, with the exception of Darwin; he has the renown, and the truly well-earned renown, of a great scholar. His main works are written in a manner requiring, in order to be understood, a trained thinking, such as the mass of the workingmen do not and cannot possess today. Thus Marx is standing, especially since he has not been much in direct contact with the masses, in an elevated position removing him personally from the people. The proletarians of all countries, to whose emancipation he has devoted his life and on whom he has bestowed the armament for their revolutionary self-assistance, know him almost solely as the man of science and as the author of the Communist Manifesto and founder of the International Workingmen’s Association; about his private life, about himself as a person, a man, they know next to nothing. Hitherto only his adversaries have had their say about Marx the man, and working from a common model they have pictured him as heartless, coldly calculating, looking down haughtily on the common people, which have served only as stepping stones to his ambition, from the eyrie of his contempt for men and the world.

How different was this man! And to bring him close to the people just as he was as a man, among his friends, in his family with wife and children, to show this generous heart together with his great mind, this generous heart that throbbed so warmly for everything human and for everything bearing human features, that is surely an act of justice and at the same time a useful task. I am not a Boswell who made a note of every word and of every movement of his idol, Johnson, as soon as he came home. I have never had any idols. Happily I became acquainted with great men so early and so intimately that my belief in idols and human gods was destroyed at a very early period, and even Marx was never an idol to me, although of all human beings I have ever met in my life he was the only one who has made an imposing impression on me.

But I have been associated with him more than a decade, in a time full of import, and at an age when we are most susceptible to deep and lasting impressions; I was his pupil in the narrower and wider sense of the word; I was his friend and confidant; I was, even after my return from England, in continued and intimate intercourse with him and his family; and the picture he has imprinted on my soul is so clear and fresh that I may well hope not to lose very much of its likeness and vividness in transferring it to paper. And if the saying, longing and love (pectus) make an orator, is true of a narrator as well, then I must succeed. True, there’s that blessed “noblesse oblige.” How to satisfy that!

However, no more hesitations. The black care that another might have done better, that perhaps I might have done better myself, shall not flutter around me any longer. Begone! And to work!

W. Liebknecht

End of March, 1886

Karl Marx, May 5, 1818, to March 14, 1883

On May 5, 1818, at Treves, the oldest German town, among the monuments of Roman civilisation and amid the recent traces of the French Revolution that had cleaned the Rhenish province of medieval rubbish, a son was born in a Jewish family: Karl Marx. Only four years had passed since the province of the Rhine had been occupied by Prussia, and the new masters hastened, in the service of the “Holy Alliance,” to replace the Heathenish-French by a Christian-German spirit. The pagan Frenchmen had proclaimed the equal rights of all human beings in the German Rhineland, and had removed from the Jews the curse of a thousand years of persecution and oppression, had made citizens and human beings of them. The Christian-German spirit of the “Holy Alliance” condemned the Heathenish-French spirit of equalisation and demanded the renovation of the old curse.

Shortly after the birth of the boy, an edict was issued leaving to all the Jews no other choice but to be baptised or to forego all official position and activity.

The father of Marx, a prominent Jewish lawyer and notary public at the county court, submitted to the unavoidable, and, with his family, adopted the Christian faith.

Twenty years later, when the boy had grown to be a man, he gave the first reply to this act of violence in his pamphlet on the Hebrew question. And his whole life was a reply and was the revenge.

“Marx’s father,” writes Marx’s daughter, “was a man of great talent, and thoroughly imbued with the French ideas of the eighteenth century concerning religion, science and art; his mother was descended from Hungarian Jews who had settled in Holland in the seventeenth century. Among his earliest friends and companions were Jenny – later his wife – and Edgar von Westphalen. It was their father, a half-Scot, who inspired Marx with his first love for the romantic school; and while his father read Voltaire and Racine to him, Westphalen read Homer and Shakespeare to him. And these ever remained his favourite authors. Loved and feared by his schoolmates – loved, because he was always ready for boyish pranks, and feared because he wrote cutting, satirical poetry and exposed his enemies to derision, he then went through the customary school course and entered the university, first Bonn, then Berlin, where he studied law for a while to please his father, and history and philosophy to please himself.”

In 1842 he planned to establish himself at the University of Bonn as lecturer of philosophy, but his friend of Berlin times, Bruno Bauer, who was private lecturer there and had no end of trouble with the higher authorities, advised him not to do so; and when Bruno Bauer was subjected to forcible measures during the year, the plan came to a natural end. In the meantime, a more fertile field had opened for the young Marx, a field for practical action. The Rhenish bourgeoisie, at that time of oppositional and decidedly liberal sentiments, the Camphausens and Hansemanns, sought a connection with this young man of 24, whose extraordinary talent they had recognised. They founded a newspaper at the head of which he was placed in the fall of 1842, the Rheinische Zeitung.

The editorship was a continual fight with the censorship that was still in vogue in Germany. “But,” writes Engels, “the censorship could not get away with the Rheinische Zeitung.” The wonderful ability of Marx to win and dominate men already stood the test here. The censors allowed many passages to slip through that offended in Berlin; they received rebuke after rebuke. Finally, when censor after censor had been used up, the dangerous paper was submitted to double censorship; that of the censor and the further censorship of the president of the provincial government. But even that was ineffectual. Thoughts are not prehensible like butterflies. And the government, arrived at the end of its Latin, resorted to force and, in March 1843, suppressed the Rheinische Zeitung.

Marx, who a short time before had married the playmate of his childhood, Jenny von Westphalen, the sister of the future reactionary Prussian minister, von Westphalen, and the sister-in-law of the Jesuit father and Christian social demagogue, Florencourt, now took up his abode In Paris, where he united with Arnold Ruge for the publication of the Deutsch-Franzoesischen Jahrbuecher. In these annals he published a lengthy essay on Hegel’s legal philosophy and another one on the Hebrew question. It becomes manifest from both of them that he has found his way out of the heaven of a philosophy, which is really only purged theology, to the firm ground of facts and to socialism. He was now through with Hegelian philosophy. And from now on the development and activity of Marx are heading straightway for that which is known to us as his doctrine and which has gained classic, perfect expression in Capital.

The Deutsch-Franzoesischen Jahrbuecher lived only a short time, and copies of it are almost unobtainable now. It may not be amiss, therefore, to quote from it the following letter of the fiery young spirit. (M is Marx and R is Ruge):

M to R, on the treckschuit[2] to D, March 1843:

I am now traveling in Holland. So far as I can gather from indigenous and French newspapers, Germany is stuck deep in the mud and is getting down into it deeper and deeper. I assure you, although one is feeling nothing less than national pride, one still feels national shame, even in Holland. The most inferior Dutchman is yet an intelligent citizen compared to the greatest German. And the opinions of foreigners about the Prussian government! There is an awe-inspiring agreement of opinion, nobody is deceived any longer about this system and its simple nature. Some good, then, has been accomplished by the new school of thought. The gorgeous drapery of liberalism is dropped, and the most detestable despotism stands forth in its real nakedness, visible to the eyes of the whole world.

This is also a revelation, although reversed. It is a truth showing us at least the hollowness of our patriotism, the nature of our administration, and teaching us to hide our faces. You regard me smiling and ask: “What does it avail? You don’t start a revolution with shame.” I reply: Shame is already a revolution; it is really the victory of the French Revolution over the German patriotism that defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of wrath turned inward. And if a whole nation were really ashamed of itself, it would be the lion crouching down for the leap. I admit, even the shame is not yet present in Germany; on the contrary, those miserables are still patriots. But what system would take the patriotism out of them, if not this ridiculous one of the new knight? The comedy of despotism enacted with us is just as dangerous for him as the tragedy was once upon a time for the Stuarts and the Bourbons. And even if for a long time this comedy should not be taken for what it really is, it would still be a revolution. The state is too serious a thing to be turned into a buffoonery. Perhaps you could let a vessel full of fools drift before the wind a good while; but it would be drifting toward its fate, just because the fools would not believe it. This fate is the impending revolution.

This is a letter showing Marx in his storm and stress period, eager for fight in the battles of the present and looking keenly ahead into the future. Already he scents the morning air of revolution.

As a sample – a sample of his style, too – let me quote the conclusion of his essay on the Hebrew question:

Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism; Judaism is the common application of Christianity, but this application could become general only after Christianity as a complete religion had theoretically accomplished the self-estrangement of Man from himself and Nature.

Now for the first time Judaism could gain universal supremacy and change dispossessed Man and Nature into disposable, saleable objects, a prey to the serfdom of egoistic wants, of barter.

Disposal is the practice of dispossession. Just as Man, while he is religiously handicapped, knows no better way to make his being objective, than to change it into a strange, phantastic being, so under the supremacy of egoistic want he can only manifest himself practically, produce practical objects, by submitting his products as well as his activity to the supremacy of a strange being and giving them the meaning of a strange being – of money.

The Christian egoism of salvation in its practical completion naturally changes into the bodily egoism of the Jew, the celestial longing into the material, the subjectivism into egotism. We do not explain the tenacity of the Jew with his religion, but rather with the human cause of his religion, the practical want, the egoism.

Because the real being of the Jew in civilised society has generally materialised, has become worldly, therefore civilised society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious being, which is in fact only the ideal conception of the practical want. Hence in the Pentateuch or in the Talmud, as well as in modern society, we find the real nature of the modern Jew, not as an abstract, but as an extremely empirical being, not alone as the limitation of the Jew, but also as the Jewish limitation of society.

As soon as society will succeed in suspending the empirical character of Judaism, the barter and its preliminary causes, the Jew will become impossible, because his consciousness will be left without an object, because the subjective base of Judaism, the practical want, will be humanised, because the conflict between the sensual existence of the individual and the generic existence of the race will be over.

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from the Jew.

To the language of the Hegelian school still used by Marx in this essay, the reader may reconcile himself as best he can. The course of reasoning is clear to everybody. Marx conceives the Hebrew question as an economic question, as a Capitalistic question. The persecution of Jews – the name of anti-semitism had not yet become fashionable – is simply the competitive envy of Christian barter directed against Jewish barter, and not until human society emancipates itself from this spirit of barter, ie, expressed in modern language of “Capitalism,” will the Jew be emancipated, like all the rest of humanity and nations.

Here we have already the thought of the Communist Manifesto, of the International Workingmen’s Association.

During his relations with the Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher, Marx became acquainted with Engels who, two years younger than himself, had gained by his stay in England a stronger materialistic conception of things and had dis-Hegeled himself thoroughly. Both supplemented each other admirably; this they understood and, equal in spite of their difference, they formed that union: a union of friendship and union of work, of political and scientific work, unparalleled in its kind and never for a moment loosened or even disturbed – a union into which both of them carried their enormous power and in which both of them developed, strengthened and fully applied it.

After the discontinuance of the Deutsch-Franzoesischen Jahrbuecher, Marx and Engels worked together with Heine, Ewerbeck and others on the Paris Vorwaerts (Advance). As a sort of first pronunciamento of their new union, they wrote in collaboration The Holy Family. This magnificent pamphlet – entirely out of print, I regret to say – is directed “against Bruno Bauer and consorts” and is, in the language of Engels, “a satirical critique of one of the last forms into which the German philosophical idealism of that time had strayed.”

Marx, who occupied himself in Paris mainly with the study of political economy (strange to say, called national economy in Germany, just as if there were anything national in political economy) and of the French Revolution, was at the same time engaged in a continuous war of the pen against the Prussian government. The latter revenged itself by securing from Guizot, at that time the all-powerful minister of the “citizen king,” his expulsion from France.

Marx now went to Brussels, where he helped to establish a workingmen’s club and where, besides occasional contributions to the Deutsche Bruesseler Zeitung (German Brussels News), he continued his studies. At the freetraders’ congress of 1846 he made a speech on free trade that was published as a pamphlet in French; and he wrote against Proudhon’s book, The Philosophy of Misery (La Philosophie de la Misere) his Poverty of Philosophy (Misere de la Philosophie) showing already the complete Marx and belonging, although originally written in French, to our party literature.

In Brussels, Marx and his friends entered the Communist Alliance, with the leaders of which he had held intercourse in Paris. It had become clear to him that the revolution could only emanate from the workingmen. In his essay on The Critique of Hegel’s Legal Philosophy, he had already proclaimed that the proletariat alone was capable of breaking the class rule, because it contained no class and in consequence nothing that could be suppressed. But in Germany the economic conditions were not yet sufficiently developed. No proletariat was ready there. “The proletariat,” he writes, “just commences to form in Germany through the impending industrial movement; for it is not the naturally evolved, but the artificially produced poverty, not the human mass mechanically reduced by the weight of society, but created by its acute dissolution, especially by the dissolution of the middle class, that forms the proletariat; although it is self-evident that the natural poverty and the Christian German serfdom also will enter its ranks by degrees.”

The fundamental conception of Capital in embryo.

The Communist Alliance had been founded in 1836 by German fugitives in Paris. “Up to the entrance of Marx a more or less conspiratorial society, the alliance now transformed itself,” writes Engels who, of course, was “in it” – “into a simple organisation for the communist propaganda, secret only by force of circumstances, the first organisation of the German Social Democratic party. The alliance existed wherever there were German workingmen’s clubs; in nearly all the German clubs of England, Belgium, France and Switzerland, and in very many clubs in Germany, the leading members belonged to this alliance, and the part played by the alliance in the growing movement of German workingmen was very important. At the same time our alliance was the first one to emphasise the international character of the entire labour movement and to put it into practice by admitting Englishmen, Belgians, Hungarians, Poles to membership and by calling international workingmen’s meetings, especially in London.”

About the character of the Communist Alliance, Marx himself has repeatedly made statements, principally in the Disclosures about the Communists’ Process and in Herr Vogt.

The German workingmen’s clubs in foreign countries were before 1848 veritable high schools of socialism or communism, as it was called then.

“The transformation of the alliance,” Engels continues, “was accomplished in two congresses held in 1847, the second of which decided on the compilation and publication of the party principles in a manifesto to be edited by Marx and Engels.”

This was the origin of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, published for the first time in 1848, shortly before the February Revolution, and since translated into nearly all the European languages.

The Communist Manifesto I do not discuss. It is the cornerstone of the modern labour movement. It is its program as Capital later became its textbook.

The Manifesto is the work of Marx and Engels. What was supplied by the one, what by the other? An idle question! It is of one mould, and Marx and Engels are one soul, as inseparable in the Communist Manifesto as they remained to their death in all their working and planning, and as they will be to humanity in their works and creations while human beings are living on earth.

And the credit to have originated this Manifesto, to have provided through it a guide of thought and action, the fundamental principles of doctrine and tactics, for the proletariat, this credit is so colossal that even by dividing it in halves both of them still receive a giant’s share.

If Marx and Engels had never created anything else, if they had been devoured by the revolution, on the eve of which they thundered forth into the world with prophetic vision the Manifesto, they had gained immortality.

* * *

The Manifesto had appeared at the beginning of February 1848 – February 22 the old crater of revolution reopened after eighteen years of rest; on February 24 the July throne was burned in front of the July column on the Bastille square, and the July column was once again for a short time a Column of Liberty.[3]

The revolution had arrived and made its rounds. In Brussels it caused stormy demonstrations. The Belgian government, which had previously refused several requests of the Prussian government to forbid a longer stay of that disagreeable Marx, had Marx arrested and transported across the frontier. He hastened to Paris, whither an invitation of his friend Flocon, editor-in-chief of the radical Reforme and member of the provisional government, had called him on February 25. In Paris he quickly found his bearings and took part in the events to the best of his powers, but he opposed the attempts of Herwegh to create disturbances. However, Marx did not like it long in Paris. The news from Germany irresistibly drew him over there. Now his field of revolutionary activity was here. He returned to Cologne in March with the plan to continue the Rheinische Zeitung and its work after an interruption of five years, on the soil of the revolution hoped for five years ago and now become actual. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared. Beside Engels, Wilhelm Wolf, the “casemate wolf,” whose name Marx has written on Capital, Ferdinand Wolf, the “red wolf” who brought along French esprit from Paris; Ernst Dronke, the author of “Secrets of Berlin”; Ferdinand Freiligrath, Georg Weerth, the sensitive poet, brimful of wit. No other paper in Germany has ever had such an editorial staff. The program for Germany was later condensed by Engels in these words: “An indivisible republic and war with Russia including restitution of Poland.”

“The Neue Rheinische Zeitung,” writes Engels, “was the only paper within the democratic movement of that time defending the standpoint of the proletariat, as witnessed by its unrestricted championing of the Paris July insurgents of 1848, whereby it estranged nearly all its stockholders. Vainly the Kreuz-Zeitung (Journal of the Cross) pointed to the ‘Chimborazo-impudence’ with which the Neue Rheinische Zeitung attacked everything holy, from the king and the administration of the realm down to the policeman, and at that in a Prussian fortress containing a garrison of 8000 men. Vainly the Rhenish philisterium of Liberals, turned suddenly reactionary, showed a passionate resentment; vainly the martial law in Cologne suspended the paper during a rather long term in the fall of 1848; vainly the Frankfort Imperial Department of Justice denounced article after article to the state prosecutor for legal prosecution. The paper was calmly edited and printed in plain view of the main guard house, the circulation and the reputation of the journal increased with the violence of the government and bourgeois attacks. When the Prussian coup d'etat followed in November, 1848, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung called on the people at the head of every issue to refuse the taxes and to meet force by force. In the spring of 1849, brought before a jury on account of this and of some other article, it was declared not guilty both times. At last, after the May revolutions of 1849 in Dresden and the Rhineland had been suppressed and the Prussian campaign against the uprising in Baden and in the Palatinate was inaugurated by the concentration and mobilisation of considerable troops, the government considered itself strong enough to suppress the Neue Rheinische Zeitung by force.”

The first number of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on June 1, 1848, the last on May 19, 1849. The last, the “red number,” printed on red paper, bears at the head the splendid poem of Freiligrath, who published several of his most powerful poems in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:

Kein offener Hieb in ehrlicher Schlaeht,

Mich faellten die Nuecken und Tuecken,

Miehfaellte die schleichende Niedertracht . . .

(Not by open blow in honest fight,

I'm felled by hook and crook,

By meanness sneaking in the night . . .)

* * *

The revolution had moved in a descending line since June 1848, since the Paris June battle, which had shown to the frightened bourgeoisie that the proletariat had attained its fighting age.

On November 9, 1848, Robert Blum died on the Brigittenau in Vienna, pierced by Austrian bullets directed by martial law, and on the same November 9, nearly at the same hour, Wrangel entered Berlin and declared the state of siege. But the revolutionary fire flickered up once more in the spring of 1849, after the refusal of the king of Prussia and the other princes to accept the constitution of the realm. The revolution was confronted by the choice either to take up arms for a last effort or to be slowly crushed by the reaction victorious in Berlin and Vienna. The time for the pen had passed momentarily, it was the day of the sword.

While Engels went to Baden and the Palatinate, taking part in the “constitutional campaign,” although free from illusions and conscious of its futility, Marx went to Paris where the radical middle class was preparing a “grand action” against the bourgeoisie shying at the red colour and eager for a stroke of diplomacy.

This action also miscarried. The radical middle class is nothing without the labourers, and the flower of the labourers had been shot in June 1848, or had fallen prey to the “dry guillotine"[4]. June 13, 1849, only revealed the impotency of the radical middle class. Ledru Rollin, the principal hero of the miscarried “action,” had to flee to London, as one year previous his colleague, Louis Blanc, had fled after the June battle. And Marx was forbidden by the government to stay in Paris or the rest of France with the exception of the Bretagne, which was considered fireproof. Marx declined the Bretagne offer with thanks and went to London.

And here he remained after seven years of wandering. Rest, however, did not come to him, nor did he wish for it.

Here, in London, the metropolis (mother city) and centre of the world and ‘of the world trade – on the watchtower of the world whence the trade of the world and the political and economic bustle of the world may be observed in a way impossible in any other part of the globe – here Marx found what he sought and needed: the bricks and the mortar for his work. Capital could be created in London only.

In London, Marx and his friends kept aloof from the foolish attempts at reigniting the ashes and the dross of the February and March revolutions. The coup d'etat of December 2, 1852, for which Marx erected in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte a monument of shame as immortal as Dante’s “terrible tercettes” – destroyed the last prospects of a revolutionary revival. For a while the “Communist Alliance” continued to exist, but after the Communist process in Cologne, ending on November 12, 1852, with the condemnation of the defendants and demonstrating the hopelessness of further propaganda in Germany so far as it could be directed from London, the Communist Alliance was dissolved. Whoever wishes to gain further information about these proceedings may read the Disclosures about the Communist Process in Cologne, 1853, written by Marx and republished in a new edition.

An attempt (1850) to continue the publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the form of a review – of irregular volumes – from London (via Hamburg), was soon wrecked by the unfavourable conditions.

After the dissolution of the Communist Alliance, Marx devoted himself entirely to his scientific studies and to journalism. He had become acquainted with David Urquhart, the talented explorer of the Orient and student of the oriental question and Russian politics, and he helped him to reveal and expose on the pillory of newspaper articles and pamphlets the shameful asininities and crooked dealings of the Middle and West European diplomacy, especially of Lord Palmerston. For the New York Tribune he wrote as a regular contributor a long series of brilliant articles on political conditions and economic questions – articles containing invaluable material that should be published also in German translation on account of their contemporary value and as examples of politico-economic writing.

In 1859, the Critique of Political Economy was published, demonstrating for the first time Marx’s theory of value.

The Italian war of 1859 drew Marx once more into politics. Bonaparte, who for good cash managed for the moneybags the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, had become the idol of the international bourgeoisie. The German middle class was especially infatuated with him, just as a little later they were with his clumsier imitator, Bismarck, and are at present with Crispi. When he declared war against Austria for the liberation of Italy in order to steady his tottering throne, the emperor of the coup d'etat suddenly became an advocate of democratic ideas; and the Prussian government, which at that time already planned the establishment of a “Greater Prussia” at the expense of Austria, tried to exploit the Bonaparte enthusiasm of the liberal bourgeoisie and to fish in troubled waters. A newspaper founded in London, The People, to which Marx and his friends contributed, antagonised those lying “attempts at overthrow” and exposed mercilessly the character and aspirations of the French empire.

On this occasion the German ex-regent of the realm, Carl Vogt, who, like other heroes of the “revolution,” had secured an appointment at the democratic court of Napoleon and his “red prince,” Plonplon, was handled somewhat roughly, thereby drawing forth from him an abusive article swollen with poison and phrases. The abusive article of Vogt was the cause of Marx’s classic pamphlet, Herr Vogt – aside from its polemical portion, a veritable treasure-box for the students of the contemporary and also of the world’s history.

Of course, the liberal bourgeoisie joined Mr Vogt in abusing like jackdaws Marx and his “sulphur gang” and in accusing him of calumny; but when in 1870 the French Empire collapsed at Sedan, the Tuileries opened their closets – like the famous iron locker that seventy-eight years before furnished the material for the death-warrant of poor Louis XVI – and from them fluttered forth the papers that demonstrated to all the world the rottenness of the flower of our patriots and professional wise men, among them the receipt for 50,000 francs which “Vogt” had received in August, 1859, immediately after the war, in which he had rendered such good services.

Meanwhile the conditions had become favourable to an independent labour movement in the different civilised countries. In England, Chartism had become extinct and Trade Unionism founded on middle-class principles and supporting the middle-class parties no longer satisfied progressive workers. In France, where the awful bloodshed of the June battle was followed by a dreary time of narrow-minded professional organisation and philistine consumers’ and producers’ clubs, the old revolutionary blood began to stir again. And in Germany the workers, roused by Marx’s disciple, Lassalle, from their foolish dream of harmony, began to perceive the necessity of class organization and to make attempts at forming an independent political party. Marx now believed the moment had arrived for the organization of an association comprising the labour movement of the different countries, emphasising its international conception and rendering possible a common, united action.

On April 28, 1863, a sympathy meeting took place in London for Poland, which had just been crushed again by Russia with the help of Prussia. Representatives of the workers of different nations had been invited and it was decided to organise an international workingmen’s association. The name, International Workingmen’s Association, was used here for the first time. Three months later, on July 22, a second sympathy meeting for Poland was held in London, in which French labourers especially took part. A thorough debate of the social question took place and the resolution to organise an International Workingmen’s Association was renewed. This idea assumed a more definite form, when in the spring of 1864 – and again in April – a delegation of workers came from Paris which resolved in a conference with German, Polish, English and American delegates to call an International delegates’ meeting for the purpose of founding the International Workingmen’s Association and to entrust Marx with the preliminary work.

Five months later, on September 28, 1864, in the memorable meeting at St James’ Hall, London, the International Workingmen’s Association was founded. Marx edited the inaugural address, the program and the constitution of the new organisation, which was not to be a fighting organisation, but rather, so far as was possible under the conditions prevailing on the continent of Europe, a centre for all endeavours pointing to the emancipation of the labouring class. The International Workingmen’s Association was in a certain measure the practical fulfilment of the appeal addressed sixteen years before in the Communist Manifesto to all workers: Proletarians of all countries unite!

The International Workingmen’s Association was called a nest of conspirators by the international reaction, but hardly ever was there a political organisation so far removed from everything conspiratorial. It was a “conspiracy” like the whole labour movement; a conspiracy in broad daylight – public like open nature, public like the history of humanity.

The same battles that Marx had in the beginning of the London exile with the instigators of revolution who fancied they could revolutionise the world through “energetic will-power” and personal sacrifice, he had to meet in the International Workingmen’s Association. The Willich & Co reappeared in the Bakunin & Co, who patched together from the wardrobe of bourgeois hyper-individualism (called hyper-humanity – Uebermenschlichkeit – in Nietzsche’s German), a horrible dummy costume that terrified the weak-nerved civilian, but which represented to the initiated only a ridiculous mask of confused backwardness of reasoning.

But this is part of a later time.

In 1867 the first volume of Capital appeared: Critique of Political Economy.

Like all great events, this, too, was not recognised at once in its full importance. Aside from the comrades of the party, the number of those who immediately recognised and acknowledged the value of this work was only small. But they grew irresistibly, and today Marx’s Capital dominates social and political science like Darwin’s works in the science of natural history. And there is no thinking proletarian in all the countries of the globe who does not know that this Capital is an armoury filled with the “mental weapons” that, wielded by the proletariat, will ensure its emancipation.

Marx has finished only one volume. Only one. When the lioness of the fable was ridiculed by a cat because she had given birth to one cub only, instead of half a dozen, she said proudly: “Only one, but a lion.”

The later volumes were not yet finished when Marx died. They have been as far as possible prepared for the press and published by his second self and trusty executor of his testament, Engels.

Three years after the publication of Capital, in 1870 the Franco-German war broke out as a natural consequence of Bismarck’s blood and iron policy and of the “national” disruption of Germany, ridding France of one imperial power and bestowing on Germany another.

Marx viewed the situation with the eyes of the student of history who traces the movements of the political atmosphere and the formation of events as the meteorologist does the currents of the air, to fixed laws; who does not suppose, but understands; who does not mistake wishes and fancies for facts, but at once separates the actual and vital points from the surrounding misty circle of fantastic conceptions and calculated obscurity.

He fully approved the standpoint and the bearing of the German Social Democracy; and when the dynastic jingoism discarded its mask after Sedan and announced the war of conquest, Marx addressed to the party delegates at Brunswick that letter, published in the Brunswick Manifesto, penetrating and illuminating as with Roentgen rays the innermost recesses of things and predicting the consequences of the policy of annexation with a definiteness and accuracy that fill one with awe of this mind capable of computing to a nicety the effects of the factors in question, because he had recognised them.

Meanwhile, the terrible war of brothers raged on, sowing hate among two nations whose friendship means the peace of the world and whose enmity means a constant threat of war.

The French labourers, who, like the German labourers had protested against the war and, not content with this, had destroyed the imperial sovereignty after Sedan, were in favour of a revolutionary conduct of the war by a general call to arms and of mobilising the entire fighting strength of the country as soon as the German defensive war changed into a war of conquest. They, the “men without a fatherland,” defended Paris, which the well-fed “patriots” wanted to deliver to the Germans at once. They defended the republic, which had been treasonably abandoned by Thiers and his “patriotic” colleagues, and after France had grovelled at the feet of the victorious Germans from fear of an armament of the whole labouring class, they rose on March 18, 1871, for the salvation of the republic.

The commune came on, and to the International Workingmen’s Association fell the task, not of directing, for this was out of the question from the first, but of carrying on or rather of helping to carry on, a hopeless yet necessary struggle against the enemies of the republic and of the labouring class in as good a manner as was possible under the circumstances.

The commune was suppressed by superior force and the International Workingmen’s Association, the terror of the civilised world, was outlawed in all countries.

What the commune was, what its struggle and death signified, is told by The Civil War in France, written by Marx with his own lifeblood and that of the commune, of which he was a part as the founder of the International Workingmen’s Association.

* * *

The International Workingmen’s Association found itself in an entirely changed position after the downfall of the commune. The field of practical action was cut off for the time being and those sectarian differences and utopian conspiracies mentioned a while ago found favourable soil.

Marx, who in his office of general secretary, was crowded more and more by work and responsibility and who above all owed it to himself and to the party to finish his Capital, was forced to bring about a change. After making short work of the Bakunin bow-wow anarchism in a crushing critique (The Alleged Schisms in the International Workingmen’s Association, he suggested the transfer of the headquarters of the association to New York, and at the congress of the Hague in 1873 a resolution to that effect was passed.

Whatever may be thought of this resolution, which has been variously criticised, Marx was enabled by it again to devote himself with full force to his scientific work and to advance the Capital so far that the work as a whole could be completed in its fundamental outlines, the second volume almost entirely and the third in some important parts.

Although the work accumulated under his hands more and more, yet Marx followed with lively interest the labour movement in all countries, especially in Germany. His letter on the outline of a program for the congress of union at Gotha (1875) was recently recalled to the memory of the comrades by the proceedings of the party meeting in Halle and Erfurt (1890 und 1891). Although the interests of the party forbade an immediate acceptance of Marx’s propositions for fear of wrecking the chances of union, yet they have received full recognition at the revision of the party program since the abolition of the socialist laws and have been of potent influence for the new (Erfurt) program.

Sickness, brought on by excessively hard work, undermined Marx’s originally very strong constitution and forced him in the seventies to go to Carlsbad and the south of France. Family misfortunes overwhelmed him. Death reaped his harvest. On the December 2, 1881, his Jenny died – the playmate of his youth, his comrade for life, his friend, his adviser, his fellow fighter. This blow struck him through the heart. With her, he himself died. Her death was his death. We who knew him felt this well.

A voyage to Algiers and the south of France did not bring him more strength. I was appalled when I saw him again in the summer of 1882. He did not complain – the deadliest blows kill the nerve, they do not cause any pain – only death. He did not recover. And then came the finishing stroke: Little Jenny, his favourite daughter, the image of himself, Longuet’s wife, died suddenly after a short illness. He remained apprehensively calm on receiving the news. In the winter of 1882-83 he was attacked by pneumonia which, however, seemed to take a favourable course. It was even believed that he was convalescent. Vain hope.

On March 14 he died quietly in his armchair, with hardly a struggle.

His daughter concludes her sketch of his life with Shakspeare’s immortal words for an epitaph: “the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world: ‘This was a man’.”

What Antonius says of Brutus who, vanquished, died at the point of his own sword – this is true in still greater measure of Marx, the unvanquished and invincible in the battle of minds and of spirits: “This was a man.”

And Engels wrote to me:

London, March 14, 1883.

Dear Liebknecht,

My telegram to Mrs B, the only address I have, will have informed you what a fearful loss the European socialist revolutionary party has experienced. Only last Friday the physician – one of the most prominent in London – had told us that there was a good chance to make him as healthy as he had ever been before if we could only hold his strength by nourishment. And just from that time on he recommenced to eat with more appetite. Suddenly at two o'clock this afternoon I found the house in tears, because he was frightfully weak. Lenchen called me upstairs; he was half asleep, and when I came up he was wrapped wholly in sleep – but eternally. The greatest mind of the second half of our century had ceased to think. About the real cause of his death I do not permit myself to make any statement, without the advice of a physician, and the whole case was so intricate that it would require whole sheets to have it described even by doctors. But this is really of no more consequence now. I have suffered a great deal of anxiety during the last six weeks, and I can only say that in my opinion, first, the death of his wife, and then, at a very critical point, that of Jenny have done their share to bring about the final crisis.

Although I have seen him tonight stretched out on his bed, the face rigid in death, I cannot grasp the thought that this genius should have ceased to fertilise with his powerful thoughts the proletarian movement of both worlds. Whatever we all are, we are through him; and whatever the movement of today is, it is through his theoretical and practical work; without him we should still be stuck in the mire of confusion.

Yours, F. Engels

* * *

It is not the scope of this work to determine and estimate the scientific importance of Marx. Neither can it be my intention to reveal here the fundamental outlines of his politico-economic doctrine. That has been done in publications known and accessible to all comrades. Only about one point I wish to make a short statement; about the so-called “materialistic conception of history” that is so frequently mentioned of late years, both appropriately and inappropriately.

Of the materialistic conception of history, which, although not “discovered” by Marx as Engels expresses it, yet has been for the first time clearly defined and applied with methodical consciousness by him, Engels writes:

The first of the important discoveries with which the name of Marx is associated in the history of science is his conception of the world’s history. All conception of history previous to him is founded on the idea that the ultimate causes of all historic changes are found in the changing ideas of men, and again that of all historic changes the political are the most important, controlling the whole of history. But whence these ideas are derived by men, and what are the moving causes of political changes nobody had ever inquired. Only in the recent school of French and partly also of English historians, the conviction had forced itself that at least since the Middle Ages the driving force in European history was the struggle of the developing bourgeoisie with the feudal nobility for the social and political supremacy. Marx, however, demonstrated that all history has been hitherto a history of class struggle, that all the numerous and intricate political struggles were carried on only for the sake of the social and political supremacy of different classes in society; for the maintenance of the supremacy by older, for the establishment of supremacy by newly rising classes.

Through what agency, now, do these classes rise and exist? Through the pressure of those material and physical conditions under which the society of a given time produces and exchanges its means of subsistence. The feudal reign of the Middle Ages was based on the self-sufficient and almost exchangeless management of small farming communities, producing nearly all their own necessities and receiving from the warlike nobility protection against external foes and national, or at least political, coherence. When the towns arose and with them a separate branch of skilled industry and a trade first confined to the home market but later on waxing international, then the civic element of the towns developed and, fighting the nobility, obtained even during the Middle Ages its admission as a likewise privileged class into the feudal order. But by the discovery of new lands outside of Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century, the bourgeoisie obtained a far more extended territory for its trade and hence a new incentive to industry; skilled labour was displaced in the most important branches by more factory-like production, which in its turn met the same fate through industrial organisation on a large scale made possible by the inventions of the last century, especially the steam engine. These industries reacted on trade by displacing manual labour in the more backward countries and creating in the further advanced countries the present new means of communication, steam engines, railroads, electric telegraphs. Thus the bourgeoisie united more and more the social wealth and the social power in its own hands, though for a long time it still remained excluded from the political power, which still rested in the hands of the nobility, and the monarchy protected by the nobility. But at a certain stage – in France after the great revolution – it also conquered this power and now became in its turn the ruling class in opposition to the proletariat and the small farmer. Observed from this point of view, all historical transactions are very easily explained – with a sufficient knowledge of the contemporaneous economic state of society, unhappily wholly missing in our professional historians; and in a most simple manner the conceptions and ideas of a given historical period are explained by the economic conditions of existence during that period, and by the social and political conditions dependent on those economic factors. History for the first time was placed on its real foundation; the obvious fact, hitherto totally neglected, that first of all men must eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, and therefore must work, before they can struggle for supremacy and devote themselves to politics, religion, philosophy, etc – this obvious fact at last found historical recognition.

Thus writes Engels in his biographical sketch of Marx from which I have repeatedly quoted. The words, class struggles, are used by him in their widest sense, in the sense of struggles of interests based on contemporary conditions of production. That these struggles will assume a different form in a nomadic nation than in a nation of hunters, and in an agricultural nation a form different from that in an industrial nation – this is without any further explanation just as self-evident as the fact that the German empire could not have been founded by a nation of Dahomey negroes. The German empire – it is always well to choose your examples from your closest surroundings – offers an admirable illustration for the correctness of the materialist conception of history. The German bourgeoisie that applauded the thought of an empire and sees to this day the essence of the most brilliant diplomatic wisdom in Bismarck’s blood and iron policy was, fifty years ago, from the first to the last man liberal, democratic, hated militarism, ridiculed the police rule – in short, opposed everything it venerates or at least deems necessary today.

What explains this change? The German bourgeoisie has become capitalistic.

As long as industrial production on a small scale predominated, the bourgeois element, oppressed and subjected to petty violence by the feudal-bureaucratic government, had an interest in opposing the administration and in coveting the political power – thus it was “democratic.”

Ever since the bourgeoisie has become capitalistic, that is, since production on a large scale prevailed, and on one hand the class antagonism brought to a climax, forced the proletariat into the class struggle under the banner of socialism, while on the other hand production on a small scale was ruined by competition – henceforth that part of the bourgeoisie not forced into the proletariat is itself a ruling class whose dominating and living issue is the utilisation of the existing means of government for its service and the alliance with such elements of a backward civilisation controlling the government as clergy, feudal nobility and so forth. In this manner the democratic German bourgeoisie has become Bismarckian and imperialistic under our very eyes – solely in consequence of the evolution of local production on a small scale to capitalistic production on a large scale.

And again this evolution, like all former progress of industry, culture and politics, is the natural consequence of the endeavour founded in human nature continually to improve our conditions of existence. And more favourable conditions of life mean improved tools, increased productiveness of labour.

Thus human civilisation is the work and product of the tools of labour.

It is true, “the history of man is the history of his tools” – of his tools and of the forms of production dependent on the tools.

Memoirs

How I became acquainted with Marx, I related more than a year ago in a little sketch for Fuchs’s Volksfeuilleton, “A bad quarter of an hour.” There I wrote:

The friendship with Marx’s two eldest daughters, then six and seven years old, began a few days after I had come to London from Switzerland, forcibly transported through France from a jail of “free Switzerland.” I found the family of Marx at a summer picnic of the Communist Labourers’ Educational Club, somewhere near London, I don’t remember whether in Greenwich or in Hampton Court. “Pere Marx,” whom I saw for the first time, began at once to subject me to a rigid examination, looked straight into my eyes and inspected my head rather minutely – an operation to which I was accustomed through my friend Gustav Struve, who, obstinately doubting my ‘moral hold’, had made me the specially favoured victim of his phrenological studies. However, I safely passed the examination, sustaining the look of that lion-head, with the coal-black lion’s mane; the examination became a vivacious, merrily rippling chat, and soon we were in the middle of the merry-making – Marx one of the most exuberant – where I at once became acquainted with Mrs Marx, with Lenchen, from her youth their faithful household assistant, and with the children. Some other time, when I have more leisure, I shall relate more of Marx’s family – it is a debt of gratitude of which I must acquit myself, and also a duty towards my comrades who have a right to demand that everyone who can contribute to the completion of the picture of the only Marx and his surroundings should do so to the best of his power. Enough – from that day on I was at home with Marx, and I never missed a day in his family then living in Dean Street, a court running off Oxford Street, while I made my quarters in neighbouring Church Street. Of Marx I shall not speak here. His wife has perhaps exerted as strong an influence on my development as he did himself. My mother died when I was three years old and I was brought up somewhat hard. I was not accustomed to earnest intercourse with women. And here I found a beautiful, noble-minded, high-spirited woman who in a half-sisterly, half-motherly way, took care of the friendless fighter for liberty, driven ashore on the banks of the Thames. The intercourse with this family, I am fully convinced has saved me from succumbing to the misery of the exile.

* * *

My first lengthy conversation with Marx took place the day after our meeting at the aforesaid picnic of the Communist Labourers’ Educational Club. There, of course, was no opportunity for a satisfactory exchange of opinions, and Marx had invited me to the clubroom for the following day, where I should probably also meet Engels. I arrived a little before the fixed time; Marx was not yet there, but I found several old acquaintances and was engaged in animated conversation, when Marx, saluting me very warmly, patted me on the shoulder and invited me downstairs to Engels in the private parlour, where we should be left more to ourselves. I did not know what a private parlour was, and I had a presentiment that now the main examination was impending, but I followed confidingly. Marx, who had made the same sympathetic impression on me as the day previous, had the quality of inspiring confidence. He took my arm and led me into the private parlour; that is to say, the private room of the host – or was it a hostess? – where Engels, who had already provided himself with a pewter pot full of dark-brown stout, at once received me with merry jokes. In a trice we had ordered Amy (or Emma, as the refugees had re-baptised her in German, on account of the similarity of sound), the sprightly waitress (I soon formed a better acquaintance with her; she married one of my comrades of Becker’s corps), in a trice we had ordered “stuff” to drink and to eat – with us fugitives the stomach question played a paramount part – in a trice the beer had been brought and we seated ourselves, myself on one side of the table, Marx and Engels opposite me. The massive mahogany table, the shining pewter pots, the foaming stout, the prospect of a genuine English beefsteak with accessories, the long clay pipes inviting to a smoke – it was really comfortable and vividly recalled a certain picture in the English illustrations of Boz. But an examination it was for all that. Well, let it come. The conversation waxed more and more fluent. I soon found that my examiners had already gathered information concerning me. A lengthy composition on the June battle I had written for Hecker’s Volksfreund in Muttenz in the summer of 1848 under the fresh impressions of the tragedy that marked a new historical era, had been read by Marx and Engels and had attracted their attention to me. I had not entertained any personal relations to them previous to meeting Engels in Geneva the year before. Of Marx I had only known the articles in the Paris annals and the Poverty of Philosophy, and of Engels The Condition of the Working Classes in England. The Communist Manifesto I – a communist since 1846 – had been able to obtain only shortly before my meeting with Engels after the constitutional campaign, although I had heard of it before, of course, and knew the contents; and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung I had seen very rarely indeed. Daring the eleven months of its publication I had been either abroad or in prison or in the chaotic storm and strife of life in the free-corps.

I was suspected by both my examiners of philistine “Democracy” and “South German sentimental haziness.” And many a judgment I pronounced on men and things met with a very sharp criticism. Nevertheless, I succeeded in clearing myself of that suspicion. I had only to relate how I had fared in Baden with the citizen “Democracy,” how Brentano, after the second disturbance (the “Struve fizzle”), had declined after a violent controversy to defend me before the jury that had summoned me for high treason and other crimes, because I had refused to deny my communist faith; how the same Brentano two months later in the middle of the outbreak, had sent me to the casemates of Rastatt on the charge of having planned an assault on him, and how subsequently he had been sharply criticised by his friend Hecker because he did not have me shot summarily before a court martial.

On the whole, the examination did not take an unfavourable course, and the conversation slowly assumed a wider scope. Soon we were on the field of natural science, and Marx ridiculed the victorious reaction in Europe that fancied it had smothered the revolution and did not suspect that natural science was preparing a new revolution. That King Steam who had revolutionised the world in the last century had ceased to rule, and that into his place a far greater revolutionist would step, the electric spark. And now Marx, all flushed and excited, told me that during the last few days the model of an electric engine drawing a railroad train was on exhibition in Regent street. “Now the problem is solved – the consequences are indefinable. In the wake of the economic revolution the political must necessarily follow, for the latter is only the expression of the former.” In the way that Marx discussed this progress of science and mechanics, his conception of the world and especially that part later on called the materialist conception of history became so clearly apparent that certain doubts I had hitherto entertained vanished like snow in the sun of spring. That evening I did not get home – we talked and laughed and drank till late the next morning, and the sun was already up when I went to bed. And I did not stay in bed long. I could not sleep. My head was too full of everything I had heard; the thoughts, surging to and fro, drove me out again, and I hastened to Regent Street in order to see the model, this modern Trojan horse that civilised society, like the Trojan men and women of old, was leading jubilantly into its Ilios in suicidal blindness, and that would surely bring on its destruction. Essetal haemar – the day will come when the holy Ilios will fall.

A great crowd indicated the show window behind which the model was exhibited. I forced my way through; to be sure, there was the engine and the train, and engine and train were spinning around merrily.

It was then 1850, the beginning of July. And today it is 1896, the beginning of April. Forty-five years and a half have passed, and no railroad train is yet driven by an electric engine. The few street cars and whatever else are operated by electricity do not signify much on the whole, however much it may appear. And in spite of all revolutionising inventions it will take some time yet before lightning, completely tamed, will allow itself to be hitched to the yoke of human labour and will drive King Steam from his throne. Revolutions are not accomplished in a sleight-of-hand fashion. Only the sensational shows in politics are called revolutions by the wonder-working rustic faith. And whoever prophesises revolutions is always mistaken in the date.

Well, though Marx was a prophet looking into the future with sharp eyes and perceiving much more than ordinary human beings, he never was a prophesiser, and when Messieurs Kinkel, Ledru Rollin and other revolution-makers announced in every appeal to their folks in partibus the typical, “Tomorrow it will start,” none was so merciless with his satire as Marx.

Only on the subject of “industrial crises” he fell victim to the prophesying imp, and in consequence was subjected to our hearty derision, which made him grimly mad. However, in the main point he was right nonetheless. The prophesied industrial crises did come – only not at the fixed time. And the causes of the prolonged intervals have been demonstrated by Marx with scientific perfection.

Apropos of this subject, let me mention that the verse against the prophets of revolutions in the famous poem of Freiligrath to Weidemeyer was inspired nearly literally by Marx while we were sitting together one evening with the “Tyrtaios of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,” who had a very susceptible ear for available remarks and generally conveyed them immediately to his notebook.

The enormous power and vital strength of civilised society has been recognised by none so well as by Marx. And England is just the right place for such a revelation. Here human society has developed most purely, one may say truly classically, and without casting aside all forms still in the concrete has overcome and excreted most thoroughly all the rubbish of previous centuries and social forms.

A would-be diplomat, Mr von Bennigsen, has lately launched in the German Reichstag the wise saying that the army is the strongest pillar of civilised society. If that man had been In England or had only an inkling of English conditions, he would not have committed himself to such a barrack-room pun. England has no army and society there stands on a foundation of such strong material and composition that the “rocher de bronce” (bronzework) of militarism in comparison to it is worm-eaten, mouldering junk. On the contrary, this “rocher de bronce,” with its Middle-Age absolutist plunder that breeds in it is a millstone around the neck of human society, hindering it in swimming and drawing it down to the bottom, while unweighted it would have strength to keep above water for a long time yet. The nervousness of the German bourgeoisie looking, like Prince Bismarck, to Dr Eisenbart for salvation and regarding as its last remedy soldiers, policemen, and “si duo faciunt idem non est idem"[5] jurists, is an unmistakable sign that in Germany society has no longer any faith in itself. And when in its desperation it increases the weight by which it is drawn into the abyss, it imitates the senseless exertions of a drowning man who by these same exertions removes the last chances of rescue and accelerates the catastrophe.

* * *

After relating how I became acquainted with Marx, let me also relate at the same time how I did not become acquainted with him – that is, how I missed making his acquaintance when the iron broom of revolution had swept me quite close to him.

By a hair’s breadth I should have met Marx in February 1848, immediately after the February bluster. We were only a few hundred paces distant from each other without my being aware of it. I had hastened from Switzerland – from Zurich – to Paris on hearing the news about the outbreak of the street fight in Paris; by Julius Froebel I was recommended to Herwegh, to whom I betook myself at once. “The iron lark” was busy fitting out the German legion, and as the thought of carrying the republic from France to Germany appeared beautiful as well as feasible to my not quite 22-year-old brain, I was easily won for the adventure. While I crawled on the birdlime, a more circumspect man who could look also behind the scenes was busily engaged in preventing the nonsense. For he understood that the plan of organising “foreign legions” for the purpose of carrying the revolution into other countries emanated from the French bourgeois republicans, and that the “movement” had been artificially inspired with the twofold intention of getting rid of troublesome elements and of carrying off the foreign labourers whose competition made itself doubly felt during this grave business crisis. This other man was Marx, of whose presence I did not learn in the whirl of excitement. And if I had learned of it, Herwegh would have done his utmost to keep us apart. Enough, I did not meet Marx, otherwise he would have carried me along in his wake then and there without a doubt. I should not have come to South Germany, but probably to Rhenish Prussia and perhaps into the office of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Well, it was not so to be. And we did not meet until two years later.

And still another man I did not meet in Paris at that time, one whom I could not meet later on. And him I did not meet, although I knew that he was in Paris. I mean Heinrich Heine. I admired his poems, but the two facts that he received a pension from Louis Philippe and contributed to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, were in my eyes, still looking through the coloured glasses of social revolutionary romanticism, such capital crimes that I could not arrive at the decision to visit the “hireling of reaction.” How I have suffered from remorse in after days! But it was a lost opportunity that did not return. And the irony of fate decreed that later on I should myself become a correspondent of the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung.

Educational and other notes: Marx as teacher

Marx endeavoured to make sure of his men and to secure them for himself. He was not such a zealous devotee of phrenology as Gustav Struve, but he believed in it to some extent, and when I first met him – I have already mentioned it – he not only examined me with questions, but also with his fingers, making them dance over my skull in a connoisseur’s style. Later on he arranged for a regular investigation by the phrenologist of the party, the good old painter, Karl Pfaender, one of the “oldest,” who helped to found the Communist Alliance, and was present in that memorable council to which the Communist Manifesto was submitted, and by whom it was discussed and accepted in due form. On this occasion a comic incident happened. One of the “old ones” of the Communist Labourers’ Educational Club was very enthusiastic over the manifesto that was read by Marx with passionate emotion – perhaps similarly as the “Robbers” once upon a time by Schiller – was quite beyond himself, like all others, applauded and shouted “Bravo” as loud as he could; but his pensive mien gave evidence that some dark point occupied his mind. On leaving he finally called Pfaender aside: “That was magnificent, but one word I did not understand – what does Marx mean by achtblaettler (plant with eight leaves)?” “Achtblaettler, achtblaettler – I have heard of plants, of clover, with four leaves, but Achtblaettler?” Pfaender was puzzled. At last the riddle was solved. Marx had a little lisp in his youth and at that time still spoke the unadulterated Rhenish dialect; the mysterious achtblaettler, behind which the old Cabetist had scented a magic formula, were simple and honest arbeiter (workingmen). We laughed many a time over this misunderstanding which, however, was beneficial to Marx in that henceforth he strove to clip the wings of his Rhenish dialect.

Well, my skull was officially inspected by Karl Pfaender and nothing was found that would have prevented my admission into the holiest of holies of the Communist Alliance. But the examinations did not cease. Mohr, who in possession of his start of five or six years was conscious of the full superiority of ripe manhood over us “young fellows,” used every opportunity to test us, and especially me. And with his colossal scope of reading and his fabulous memory he could make it rather unpleasant for us. How he rejoiced when he had tempted a “little student” to go on the ice and demonstrated on the person of the unfortunate the inadequateness of our universities and of academic culture.

But he educated, too, systematically. I can say of him for two reasons, in the more limited and in the wider sense of the word: he was my teacher. And one had to follow him to all fields of knowledge. Political economy I need not mention. In the palace of the Pope it is superfluous to speak of the Pope. Of the lectures on political economy in the Communist Club I shall speak later. In the ancient and modern languages Marx was equally well at home. I was a philologist, and it gave him a childlike pleasure when he could show me some difficult passage from Aristotle or Aeschylus in which I could not at once find my way. How he scolded me one day because I did not know any Spanish. Quickly he snatched up Don Quixote from a pile of books and gave me a lesson without loss of time. From Dietz’s Comparative Grammar of the Romanic Languages I knew the fundamental outlines of grammar and etymology, and so we went along smoothly under Mohr’s excellent guidance and his careful help, when I stumbled or paused. And how patient he was in teaching, he who otherwise was so stormily impatient. Our lesson was brought to a close only by the entrance of a visitor. And every day I was examined and had to translate from Don Quixote or some other Spanish book until the proof of my capability seemed sufficiently established.

Marx was an excellent philologist, true, more of modern than of ancient languages. The German grammar of Grimm he knew to a nicety, and in the German dictionary of the brothers Grimm, so far as it had been published, he was better versed than I, the philologist. He wrote English and French like an Englishman or a Frenchman, although he had some difficulty in pronouncing. His articles for the New York Tribune are written in classic English; his Misere de la Philosophie against Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misere is written in classic French. The French friend who revised the manuscript for him before it went to press found very little to correct.

Marx, being familiar with the spirit of languages and having occupied himself with their origin, development and organism, found no difficulty in learning languages. In London, he was still learning Russian, and during the Crimean War he even had the intention of learning Arabic and Turkish which, however, was abandoned. Like everyone who really wishes to master a language, he attributed the principal value to reading. Whoever has a good memory, and Marx had a rare memory that never relaxed its hold, will easily acquire possession of the treasures of word and expression by much reading. Their practical use is then easily learned.

* * *

During the years 1850 and 1851 Marx delivered a course of lectures on political economy. He made up his mind to it rather unwillingly; but once he had read a few private lectures to a small circle of friends, he yielded to us and agreed to teach before a larger audience. In this course that was a rare treat to all who had the good fortune to take part in it, Marx had already developed his system in all its fundamental outlines, as presented to us in Capital. In the crowded room of the Communist Alliance, or Communist Laborers’ Educational Club, at that time still domiciled in Great Windmill Street, in the same room where one year and a half previous the Communist Manifesto had been confirmed, Marx exhibited a remarkable talent of popularising. Nobody hated more than he the vulgarising of science, that is the adulterating and rendering it shallow and spiritless; but nobody possessed in a higher degree the quality of expressing himself clearly. Clearness of speech is the fruit of clear reasoning, a clear thought necessitates a clear form.

Marx proceeded methodically. He stated a proposition, the shorter the better, and then demonstrated it in a lengthier explanation, endeavouring with utmost care to avoid all expressions incomprehensible to the labourers. Then he requested his audience to question him. If this was not done he commenced to examine them, and he did this with such pedagogic skill that no flaw, no misunderstanding, escaped him. I learned on expressing my surprise about his dexterity that Marx had formerly given lectures on political economy in the labourers’ club in Brussels. At all events he had the qualities of a good teacher. He also made use of a blackboard, on which he wrote the formulas, among them those familiar to all of us from the beginning of Capital.

What a pity that the course lasted only about six months or even less. There were certain elements entering the Communist Alliance that did not suit Marx. After the waves of the flood of fugitives had subsided, the Alliance shrank together and assumed a somewhat sectarian character: the old Weitlingians and Cabetists resumed their pompous ways and Marx, who such a narrow sphere of action did not satisfy, and who could do something better than sweep away old cobwebs, kept aloof from the Communist Alliance. For my part, I did not follow his example, but considered it my duty to keep in touch with the only German labour organisation in London. I had been a member of the German Labourers’ Club in Zurich as far back as 1847-48, and however little I had been of benefit to the club – a knave gives more than he has – I had profited a great deal myself. And thus I also regarded the London Communist Alliance in the light of a Labourers’ Educational Club, such was its rightful name, for myself. I felt that I had much to learn which I could learn only by intercourse with labourers, and although I would fain have had a wider sphere of motion and action I still was content with the small one in the absence of a larger. And I have never regretted it.

With the exception of one year when I was prevented by political differences I have been a regular member of the Communist Alliance up to the day of my departure from London, have given lectures there and lessons in German, English, French and other studies. The club was even the cause of a conflict with Marx. However high he stood to me and however much I loved him, infallibility was not recognised, and if I did not find in debate that I was wrong I did not admit of being overruled by another’s opinion.

Marx himself was, of course, within the confines of communistic conceptions, the most tolerant of men. He could stand opposition, although not infrequently he flew into a passion over it; and afterwards he even enjoyed having received a strong answer. But by men who were more “Marxian” than Marx himself – who did not wish to be called a “Marxist” and ridiculed the “Marxists” to his heart’s content – plots were woven against me, and one fine day I found myself charged with the crime of violating our principles by my actions in the London Communist Alliance, of having made concessions to the Weitlingian and other sectarians that were inadmissible from a tactical and theoretical standpoint of trying to gain an unorthodox counterbalance against the orthodoxy of the Communist Alliance, and to have deviated from the straight road through the attempt of playing the role of a “mediator” between the pure communistic doctrine and the practice, especially between Marx and the workingmen.

The spirits met in a lively clash. Marx violently deprecated the “mediator business”; if he had anything to say to the labourers he could say it himself. This I did not deny, of course, but I maintained my right to serve the party in a way that seemed most appropriate to me, and declared it crazy tactics for a workingmen’s party to seclude itself away up above the workers in a theoretical air-castle; without workingmen, no workingmen’s party, and the labourers we must take as we find them. You see, it was a conflict that has been repeated later on. By personal instigations this trifling incident was inflated to a conflict, and I remained in the minority. This embittered me; and for several months I eschewed the house of Marx. But one day the children met me on the street; they scolded me for staying away so long; their mamma, they said, was quite mad with me, and I went along with them, was received as usual, and Marx himself, whose originally serious look melted when I stepped close to him, laughingly shook my hand. And that conflict was mentioned no more.

Disputations I have had by the score with Marx, a quarrel with him only twice. This was the first time. The second was some twenty years later, and, curiously enough, over the same subject. It was in 1874: the longing for unity between the Lassalleans and the “honest ones” made itself equally felt on both sides and the political conditions made union a necessity. But there were still certain prejudices to respect, and in the program for union outlined by ourselves we had to submit to certain concessions. Marx, who could not survey the conditions of things from abroad as well as we in Germany, would not hear of such concessions; and after a prolonged exchange of opinions with me that famous letter was written about which so much was said some years ago. Marx was highly incensed against me for a long time, but in the interest of the movement in Germany I had had no other choice. If It had been a question of sacrificing a principle, Marx certainly would have been right; but it was only a matter of yielding temporarily for the purpose of securing great tactical advantages for the party. And it cannot be called a sacrifice of principle when the sacrifice is made in the interest of principle. That I did not make a wrong calculation in this respect has been brilliantly demonstrated by the consequences and the successes. The declaration of principles was accomplished within the united parties so speedily and so smoothly that, had not the “law of exception” during the time of its validity forced the program question into the background, we could have proceeded with the clarification of the program as early as the close of the 1870s without any opposition worth mentioning. As it was, this bad to be postponed to the beginning of the 1890s.

Marx has finally acknowledged this. He was charmed by the progress of the party movement in Germany, and shortly before his death he said to me: “I am proud of the German labourers: without a doubt they are leading the international labour movement.” Similarly Engels has expressed himself, although he retained his animosity on account of the program for union for a longer time.

Marx was no orator, it was not his nature. In The Hague, at the last congress of the International Workingmen’s Association, he is said to have spoken very well, so I have been told. I was at that time with Bebel in the “fortress” Hubertusburg. I have never heard him making a speech; neither was there any opportunity for him during the time of our association.

* * *

It is claimed that Marx had no “style,” or at least a very bad style. This is claimed by those who have no idea of style – polishers of words and twisters of phrases who have not understood and were not capable of understanding Marx – not capable of following the flight of his genius to the highest peaks of science and passion and into the lowest depths of human misery and human baseness. If ever Buffon’s word was true of any man it was in regard to Marx: the style is the man – the style of Marx is Marx. A man so thoroughly true who knew no other cult but that of truth, who in a moment would cast aside dearly acquired and cherished propositions whenever he had convinced himself of their inaccuracy, could not but show his true self in his writings. Incapable of hypocrisy, incapable of acting and posing, he was always himself in his writings as in his life. True, in a nature so manifold, so far embracing, so multiform, the style cannot be so uniform or evenly balanced or even simple as in less complex, less embracing natures. The Marx of Capital, the Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire and the Marx of Herr Vogt are three different Marxs, and in their differences still the one Marx, in their trinity still a unit – the unit of a great personality expressing itself differently on different topics and still remaining the same person. Certainly the style of Capital is difficult to understand, but is the subject it treats of easy to grasp? The style is not only the man, it is also the subject matter and it must be adapted to the latter. “There is no royal road to science,” everyone has to exert himself and to climb, even with the best of guides. To complain of the difficult, obscure or clumsy style of Capital is only revealing one’s own slothfulness of thought or incapability of reasoning.

Is the Eighteenth Brumaire unintelligible? Is the dart incomprehensible that flies straight at his target and pierces the flesh? Is the spear unintelligible that, hurled by a steady hand, penetrates the heart of the enemy? The words of the Brumaire are darts, are spears, they are a style that stigmatises, kills. If hate, if scorn, if burning love of freedom ever found expression in flaming, annihilating, elevating words, then it is surely in the Eighteenth Brumaire, in which the aroused seriousness of Tacitus is united to the deadly satire of Juvenal and the holy wrath of Dante. The style is here what it, the stylus, originally was in the hands of the Romans: a sharp-pointed steel pencil for writing and for stabbing. The style is the dagger used for a well-aimed thrust at the heart.

And in Herr Vogt this laughing humour, this joy suggestive of Shakespeare finding a Falstaff and with him an inexhaustible mine from which to fill an armoury with sarcasm.

Let us waste no more time discussing the style of Marx. Marx’s style is just Marx. For trying to squeeze into the smallest possible space the greatest possible content he has been blamed, but that is just Marx.

Marx attached great value to pure, correct expression. And in Goethe, Lessing, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, which he read almost daily, he had chosen the great masters. In regard to purity and precision of language, he was of painstaking conscientiousness. I remember well that once during the early time of my stay in London he gave me a severe lecture because I had said in an article: “die stattgehabte Versammlung” (the meeting held). I tried to excuse myself with the colloquial use of the language, but Marx broke out: “Those miserable German colleges where one cannot learn any German, those miserable German universities,” and so forth. I defended myself as best I could, I cited also examples from classic authors, but I have not spoken any more of a “stattgehabten” or “stattgefundenen” occurrence, and I have prevailed on many others to discard it. On the other hand I saved, in that battle about the intransitive past participle, the “gelernten Schuster” (shoemaker by trade) by the help of the “gelehrten Schuster” (learned shoemaker) who Marx could not well recognise as correct.

Marx was a rigid purist. He often searched tediously and long for the right expression. He hated the superfluous foreign words, and while he nevertheless has made frequent use of foreign words where the subject did not make them imperative, it is necessary to take into consideration his long stay in foreign countries, especially in England and, a very essential reason, the affinity of German and English, rendering mistaken substitutions easy. In Capital Marx is speaking, eg, of “zusammengehudelten Menschen” (people huddled together) where he was thinking of the English “huddle together,” which has nothing in common with our “hudeln” (to praise fawningly), except the first origin, and means “to squeeze together, to intermingle without order.” But what an infinite wealth of original, genuinely German forms and applications of words do we find in Marx, who, although he passed two-thirds of his life In foreign countries, deserves great credit for his advancement of the German language and is one of the most distinguished masters and creators of the German language.

He was a purist, sometimes to the extent of becoming pedantic. And my Upper-Hessian dialect, which obstinately clung to me, or I to it, was the cause of innumerable censures. In these skirmishes I was lucky to have an ally who Marx respected as highly as I did myself. I mean my Hessian countryman, although not born in officially so-called Hesse, the Frankforter, Wolfgang Goethe. I used the forms: hunten, unten, drunten (below, under), hoben, oben, droben (up, above), haussen, aussen, draussen (out, outside), hueben, ueben, drueben (beyond, over there), and so forth. This always aroused Marx, who had a strong antipathy against the “hunten, hoben, haussen,” but finally decided on Goethe’s authority to tolerate, if not endorse them. By telling such trifling incidents I wish to show how Marx felt his place as a teacher in relation to us “young ones.”

This naturally expressed itself in many other ways. He demanded much. No sooner had he discovered a flaw in our knowledge than he urged impetuously that it be remedied – he offering the necessary advice. On being alone with him you had to submit to a regular examination. And these examinations were no joke. Marx was not to be hoodwinked. And when he found that nothing would avail, it was all over with his friendship. It was an honour for us to be disciplined by him. Never was I with him without learning something. And that I did not go to the bottom in the hard struggle for existence, for the naked physical life, or let us rather say for keeping from starving, because we had to hunger for years in London, that I did not perish in this desperate struggle for a piece of bread or a few potatoes, I owe to Marx and his family.

* * *

On account of my affection for Marx I was often ridiculed by friends and comrades of a time prior to my stay in London. Only lately I found a letter written by one of the most active Badish members of the free-corps, by Bauer of Sinsheim, who died a few years ago in Milwaukee as the editor of a radical democratic newspaper established by himself. After a short stay in London he had gone, like most of the fugitives possessing the necessary means, to the United States, where he soon had found a congenial occupation in the newspaper business. It was during the worst time of the London exile, and he wanted me to join him at all events. In several letters he had already invited me, offering me the certain prospect of a considerable editor’s salary. And when you have not even dry crusts to whet your teeth, then $50 per week, which he had offered me, is quite an alluring bait. But I withstood; I did not wish to depart any further than necessary from the battlefield, and whoever goes “across” to the other side of the great water is lost to Europe in 999 cases out of a thousand.

Finally Bauer tried his best trump: he flattered my self-love. In a letter which I still have among my papers, he wrote: “Here, then, you are a free man, you can independently accomplish something. And over yonder? A playball, an ass serving as pack mule and afterwards ridiculed. How do you get along in your heavenly realm? Up above is enthroned the Omniscient, the All-Wise, your Dalai Lama Marx. Then follows a great, great void. And then comes Engels. And then comes another great, great void. And then comes Wolf. And then again comes another great, great void. And then, perhaps, comes that “sentimental ass” Liebknecht.” Well, I answered that I had no objection to coming after men who had accomplished more than I, that I preferred to be in the society of men from whom I could learn, and to whom I could look up rather than of such on whom I would have to look down, as would be the case with all his “great men.”

And I stayed where I was, and learned.

But such was the judgment pronounced on Marx and our society by the fugitives outside of our circle; that we secluded ourselves completely from them, stimulated their fancy and produced a maze of myths and gossip, which, however, did not turn our hair grey.

Popularity

For popularity Marx entertained a sovereign contempt. What he especially praised in Robert Owen was that whenever any of his ideas became popular he would come forth with a new demand making him unpopular. Free from all conceit, Marx could not attribute any value to the applause of the masses. The masses were to him a brainless crowd whose thoughts and feelings were furnished by the ruling class. And while socialism has not spiritually soaked through the masses, the applause of the crowd can, as a logical consequence, be bestowed only on men belonging to no party or to the adversaries of socialism. Today, when socialistic conceptions have begun to pervade the masses and to influence so-called “public opinion,” this is no longer true to the same extent as 40 or 50 years ago. Then it was only a tiny minority within the labouring class itself that had raised itself to socialism; and among socialists themselves those in the scientific sense of Marx – in the sense of the Communist Manifesto – were in the minority. The bulk of the labourers, so far as they had become awake to political life, were wrapped in the mists of sentimental democratic wishes and phrases such as were a part of the movement of 1848 with its preludes and epilogues. The applause of the masses – popularity – was to Marx a proof of being in the wrong and his favourite quotation was the proud verse of Dante:

Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti. (Follow your course and let the people talk.)

How often has he quoted this verse that also concludes his preface to Capital. Nobody is impervious to blows, thrusts, stings of mosquitoes or bugs, and how often may Marx, following his course, attacked on all sides, worried by cares of existence, misunderstood by the mass of the workingmen for whose battle of freedom he was forging the weapons in the stillness of the night, even scorningly disavowed by them while they were running after shallow phrase-twisters, glistening traitors or, perhaps, open enemies – how often may he, in the solitude of his poor, genuinely proletarian study, have cheered his own courage with the words of the great Florentine and gathered new strength from them.

He was not to be turned aside from his purpose. Unlike the prince in Arabian Nights, who lost the victory and the price of victory because he was tempted by the noise and the phantasms around him to look timidly around and backward, he proceeded in his path, his eyes steadily directed ahead at the shining goal. He “let the people talk,” and if the world’s orb had crumbled to pieces nothing would have restrained him in his course. And victory came to him. True, not the price of victory.

Before all-conquering death felled him he had lived to see the seed he had scattered growing up wonderfully and ripening for the scythe of the harvester. Yes, he had the victory, and we have the price of victory.

Popularity being hateful to him, he felt a holy wrath against soliciting popularity. Smooth-tongued orators were an abomination to him, and woe to him who indulged in phrases. There he was inexorable. “Phrasemonger” was in his mouth the sharpest censure, and whoever he once had recognised as a “phrasemonger” he ignored forever. To think logically and to express your thoughts clearly, this he impressed on us “young fellows” on every occasion and forced us to study.

About this time the magnificent reading room of the British Museum, with its inexhaustible treasures of books, had been built, and thither, where he passed a certain time every day, Marx drove us. To learn! To learn! This was the categorical imperative he frequently enough loudly shouted to us, but it also was expressed by his example, yea, by the sole aspect of this forever strenuously working mind.

While the rest of the fugitives were laying plans for the overthrow of the world and intoxicating themselves day by day, evening by evening with the hashish drink of: “Tomorrow it will start,” we, the “sulphur-gang” the “bandits,” the “scum of humanity,” were sitting in the British Museum and trying to educate ourselves and to prepare arms and ammunition for the battles of the future.

Sometimes we would not have had a bite, but that would not prevent our going to the Museum. There were at least comfortable chairs to sit down on and in winter a cheering warmth, which were missing at home, if one had any “house” or “home” at all.

* * *

Marx was a strict teacher; 