dismissed in the most meager fashion, while his economic theories
were discussed with something that verged upon fury. Even such
standard works as those of Mehring and Spargo, which profess to be
partly biographical, sum up the personal side of Marx in a few
pages. In fact, in the latter's preface he seems conscious of this
defect, and says:

Whether socialism proves, in the long span of centuries, to be
good or evil, a blessing to men or a curse, Karl Marx must always
be an object of interest as one of the great world-figures of
immortal memory. As the years go by, thoughtful men and women will
find the same interest in studying the life and work of Marx that
they do in studying the life and work of Cromwell, of Wesley, or
of Darwin, to name three immortal world-figures of vastly
divergent types.

Singularly little is known of Karl Marx, even by his most ardent
followers. They know his work, having studied his Das Kapital with
the devotion and earnestness with which an older generation of
Christians studied the Bible, but they are very generally
unacquainted with the man himself. Although more than twenty-six
years have elapsed since the death of Marx, there is no adequate
biography of him in any language.

Doubtless some better-equipped German writer, such as Franz
Mehring or Eduard Bernstein, will some day give us the adequate
and full biography for which the world now waits.

Here is an admission that there exists no adequate biography of
Karl Marx, and here is also an intimation that simply as a man,