ad not yet fitted into the ordinary course of
things. He was an anomaly, a person who howled in beer-houses, and who
would presently be regulated, either by the statesmen or by the police.

When our old friend, Mark Tapley, was making with his master a homeward
voyage to Britain, what did he know or even care about the politics of
France, or Germany, or Austria, or Russia? Not the slightest, you may
be sure. Mark and his master represented the complete indifference of
the Englishman or American--not necessarily a well-bred indifference,
but an indifference that was insular on the one hand and republican on
the other. If either of them had heard of a gentleman who pillaged an
unmarried lady's luggage in order to secure a valuable paper for
another lady, who was married, they would both have looked severely at
this abnormal person, and the American would doubtless have added a
remark which had something to do with the matchless purity of
Columbia's daughters.

If, again, they had been told that Ferdinand Lassalle had joined in the
great movement initiated by Karl Marx, it is absolutely certain that
neither the Englishman nor the American could have given you the
slightest notion as to who these individuals were. Thrones might be
tottering all over Europe; the red flag might wave in a score of
cities--what would all this signify, so long as Britannia ruled the
waves, while Columbia's feathered emblem shrieked defiance three
thousand miles away?

And yet few more momentous events have happened in a century than the
union which led one man to give his eloquence to the social cause, and
the other to suffer for that cause until his death. Marx had the higher
thought, but his disciple Lassalle had the more attractive way of
presenting it. It is odd that Marx, today, should lie in a squalid
cemetery, while the whole western world echoes with his praises, and
that Lassalle--brilliant, clear-sighted, and remarkable for his
penetrating genius--should have lived in luxury, but should now know
nothing but oblivion, even among those who shouted at his eloquence and
ran beside him in the glory of his triumph.

Ferdinand Lassalle was a native of Breslau, the son of a wealthy Jewish
silk-merchant. Heymann Lassal--for thus the father spelled his
name--stroked his hands at young Ferdinand's cleverness, but he meant
it to be a commercial cleverness. He gave the boy a thorough education
at the University of Breslau, and later at Berlin.