Such was Marx, and thus he lived and died. His wife, who had long
been cut off from her relatives, died about a year before him.
When she was buried, he stumbled and fell into her grave, and from
that time until his own death he had no further interest in life.

He had been faithful to a woman and to a cause. That cause was so
tremendous as to overwhelm him. In sixty years only the first
great stirrings of it could be felt. Its teachings may end in
nothing, but only a century or more of effort and of earnest
striving can make it plain whether Karl Marx was a world-mover or
a martyr to a cause that was destined to be lost.





FERDINAND LASSALLE AND HELENE VON DONNIGES


The middle part of the nineteenth century is a period which has
become more or less obscure to most Americans and Englishmen. At
one end the thunderous campaigns of Napoleon are dying away. In
the latter part of the century we remember the gorgeousness of the
Tuileries, the four years' strife of our own Civil War, and then
the golden drift of peace with which the century ended. Between
these two extremes there is a stretch of history which seems to
lack interest for the average student of to-day.

In America, that was a period when we took little interest in the