together into the front room, and, when night approached, we made our beds on the floor. There the three living children were lying at our side, and we cried about the little angel who rested cold and lifeless near us. The death of the dear child fell into the time of the most bitter poverty. I went to a French refugee living in the vicinity, who had visited us before. He gave me two pounds sterling, with the friendliest sympathy. With this money [they had no other] the little coffin was purchased in which my poor child now slumbers peacefully. It had no cradle when it entered the world, and the last little abode also was for a long time denied it.”

Marx lost several children, including two boys, one after a long illness. "Well I remember," says Liebknecht, who has vividly described Marx's adoration of his children,

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well I remember the sad weeks of sickness without hope. The death of this boy was a fearful blow to Marx. The boy-called 'Moosh' (Mouche, or fly), 'really Edgar, after an uncle—was very gifted, but ailing from the day of his birth—a genuine child of sorrow, this boy, with the magnificent eyes and the promising head that was, however, much too heavy for the weak body. If poor 'Moosh'

could have obtained quiet, enduring nursing, and a sojourn in the country or near the sea, then, perhaps, his life might have been saved. But in the existence of the exile, in the chase from place to place, in the misery of London, it was impossible, even with the most tender love of the parents and care of the mother, to make the tender little plant strong enough for the struggle of existence.

"Moosh' died; I shall never forget the scene; the mother, silently weeping, bent over the dead child. . . . Marx, in a terrible excitement, vehemently, almost angrily, rejecting all consolation, the two girls clinging to their mother, crying quietly, the mother clasping them convulsively, as if to hold them and defend them against Death that had robbed her of her boy.

"Then two days later came the funeral. I in the carriage with Marx-he sat there dumb; I stroked his forehead:

"""Mohr," you still have your wife, your girls and us—and we all love you so well!'

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'You cannot give me back my boy!' he groaned and silently we rode on to the graveyard in Tottenham Court Road.

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When the coffin-singularly large, for during the illness the formerly very backward

child had grown surprisingly-when the coffin was about to be lowered into the grave, Marx was so excited that I stepped to his side, fearing he might jump after the coffin."

This was a part of the price that Karl Marx and his wife paid for “ Das Capital."

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Of that great work there is here leisure to say no more than has already been said in these pages wherein I have tried to make clear its essentials as they endure to-day. Though only the first volume of all that had been planned, it stands, even to those who disagree with its primary conceptions, as one of the greatest and most enduring works of political economy. Difficult as it is to the layman, it is a classic to the economist; and hard reading as it may be found to be by the uninitiated, it has undergone such frequent translation into more popular forms as to have been, in effect, read by more people than any other book of its sort that was ever written. Certainly no work of its particular kind has so colored the opinions or affected the lives of mankind.

But the production of this book had, as I have said, cost Marx and his wife dear. Through the Franco-Prussian War, which started in 1870, three years after that volume had been published, Marx worked, as he could

no longer safely work, at his task as General Secretary of the International Workingmen's Association. For five years more decay continued its insidious approaches. On the second of December, 1881, Frau Marx died with the name of her husband upon her lips. "Then 'Mohr' is dead, too!" cried Engels when he heard the news-and Engels was right: the iron soul of Marx was shattered at last; a voyage to Algiers and the South of France availed nothing and, shortly after his favorite daughter, Jenny, died at the end of a brief illness, her father, apparently convalescing from an attack of pneumonia, himself died in his armchair, very quietly, on the fourteenth of March, 1883.

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Marx," says Liebknecht in a noble passage concerning his hero's lifework,* "had finished only one volume. Only one. When the lioness of the fable was ridiculed by a cat because she had given birth to but one cub instead of half a dozen, she proudly answered: "Only one-but a lion!'"

*"Memoirs"; Introduction.

VII

THE PROPAGANDA

"Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; I know thy works, and thy labor and thy patience."

-The Revelation of St. John the Divine ii: 1-2.

To the International Workingmen's Association had, as is pointed out by Liebknecht in his introduction to the "Memoirs," fallen "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 (French) republic, and of the laboring class, in as good a manner as was possible in the circumstances." As a natural consequence, upon the wreck of the French Commune, "suppressed by superior force," this association, then the especial bête noir of all monarchists, was generally outlawed throughout Europe, and its connection with that Commune in a