own by Marx. The tactics and principles he outlined are now
theirs. The unity of the workers he pleaded for is rapidly being
achieved throughout the entire world, and everywhere these armies are
marching toward the goal made clear by his life and labor. "Although I
have seen him to-night," writes Engels to Liebknecht, March 14, 1883,
"stretched out on his bed, the face rigid in death, I cannot grasp the
thought that this genius should have ceased to fertilize with his
powerful thoughts the proletarian movement of both worlds. Whatever we
all are, we are through him; and whatever the movement of to-day is, it
is through his theoretical and practical work; without him we should
still be stuck in the mire of confusion."[2]

What was this mire? If we will cast our eyes back to the middle of last
century we cannot but realize that the ideas of the world have undergone
a complete revolution. When Marx began his work with the labor movement
there was absolute ignorance among both masters and men concerning the
nature of capitalism. It was a great and terrible enigma which no one
understood. The working class itself was broken up into innumerable
guerilla bands fighting hopelessly, aimlessly, with the most antiquated
and ineffectual weapons. They were in misery; but why, they knew not.
They left their work to riot for days and weeks, without aim and without
purpose. They were bitter and sullen. They smashed machines and burned
factories, chiefly because they were totally ignorant of the causes of
their misery or of the nature of their real antagonist. Not seldom in
those days there were meetings of hundreds of thousands of laborers, and
not infrequently mysterious epidemics of fires and of machine-breaking
occurred throughout all the factory districts. Again and again the
soldiers were brought out to massacre the laborers. In all England--then
the most advanced industrially--there were few who understood
capitalism, and among masters or men there was hardly one who knew the
real source of all the immense, intolerable economic evils.

The class struggle was there, and it was being fought more furiously and
violently than ever before or since. The most striking rebels of the
time were those that Marx called the "bourgeois democrats." They were
forever preaching open and violent revolution. They were dreaming of the
glorious day when, amid insurrection and riot, they should stand at the
barricades, fighting the battle for freedom.