resolution was
adopted requesting Marx and Engels to prepare "a complete theoretical
and working programme" for the League. This they did. It took the form
of the _Communist Manifesto_, published in the early part of January,
1848.

II

The authors of the _Manifesto_ were men of great intellectual gifts.
Either of them alone must have won fame; together, they won immortality.
Their lives, from the date of their first meeting in Paris, in 1844, to
the death of Marx, almost forty years later, are inseparably interwoven.
The friendship of Damon and Pythias was not more remarkable.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born on the fifth day of May, 1818, at Treves,
the oldest town in Germany, dating back to Roman times. His parents were
both people of remarkable character. His mother--_nee_ Pressburg--was
the descendant of Hungarian Jews who in the sixteenth century had
settled in Holland. Many of her ancestors had been rabbis. Marx was
passionately devoted to his mother, always speaking of her with reverent
admiration. On his father's side, also, Marx boasted of a long line of
rabbinical ancestors, and it has been suggested that he owed to this
rabbinical ancestry some of his marvelous gift of luminous exposition.
The true family name was Mordechia, but that was abandoned by his
grandfather, who took the name of Marx, which the grandson was destined
to make famous. The father of Karl was a lawyer of some prominence and
considerable learning, and a man of great force of character. In 1824,
the boy Karl being then six years old, he renounced the Jewish religion
and embraced Christianity, all the members of the family being baptized
and received into the Church.

There is a familiar legend that this act was the result of compulsion,
being taken in response to an official edict.[46] He held at the time
the position of notary public at the county court, and it is claimed
that the official edict in question required all Jews holding official
positions to forego them, and to abandon the practice of law, or to
accept the Christian faith. Many writers, including Liebknecht[47] and
one of the daughters of Karl Marx,[48] have given this explanation of
the renunciation of Judaism by the elder Marx. It seems certain,
however, that the act was purely voluntary, and that there was no such
edict.[49] It may be that social ambitions had something to do with it,
that he hoped to attain, as a Christian, a measure of success not
possible to an adher