Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Contents

Foreword 1

Chapter 01: Origins and Childhood 3

Chapter 02: A Happy Year at Bonn 13

Chapter 03: Jenny von Westphalen 16

Chapter 04: Student Years in Berlin 22

Chapter 05: Philosophy under Censorship 31

Chapter 06: The Germans Learn French 44

Chapter 07: The Communist Artisans of Paris 53

Chapter 08: The Life-long Friend 60

Chapter 09: Clarification 68

Chapter 10: Face to Face with Primitive Communism 73

Chapter 11: The Communist League 84

Chapter 12: The Revolutionary Tempest 94

Chapter 13: The 'Mad Year' in Cologne 106

Chapter 14: Defeat with Honour 121

Chapter 15: The End of the Communist League 136

Chapter 16: The Sleepless Night of Exile 154

Chapter 17: The International Working Men's Association 176

Chapter 18: Michael Bakunin 189

Chapter 19: The Franco-Prussian War 201

Chapter 20: The Downfall of the International 223

Chapter 21: The Last Ten Years 246

Chapter 01: Origins and Childhood

Trier deservedly enjoys the reputation of being the oldest town in Germany. Its origins are lost in the mists of antiquity. A metropolis under the Roman Empire, it was brought to ruin in the stormy times of the migration of the peoples, but rose and flourished again in the Middle Ages under the mild sway of its bishops, whose diocese extended to Metz, Toul and Verdun. Its position at the extreme edge of German-speaking territory made of it an intermediary between German culture and French. It changed its overlords more than once. It belonged to the German Holy Roman Empire, then to the Kingdom of France, then it became German once again. After the outbreak of the French Revolution a stream of French émigrés poured into Trier as into other frontier towns, and for some years it was the outpost of the Coblenz Reaction. The White detachments were formed in Trier, where conspiracies were hatched and emissaries forgathered going into or coming out of France.

In the autumn of 1793, just a quarter of a century before the birth of Marx, when the Allies were retreating to the Rhine before the armies of the Revolution, Goethe came to Trier with the Duke of Weimar's troops. 'The town has one striking characteristic,' he wrote in his French Campaign. 'It claims that it possesses more religious buildings than any other place of the same size. Its reputation in this respect could scarcely be denied. For within its walls it is burdened, nay oppressed, with churches and chapels and cloisters and colleges and buildings dedicated to chivalrous and religious orders, to say nothing of the abbacies, Carthusian convents and institutions which invest, nay blockade, it.'

The waves of the Reformation never reached Trier, and the political and economic power of the Church remained unbroken. For all that its clerical Electors did a good deal for culture and for art. The last, Clement Wenceslaus, who was forced to flee before the victorious troops of the Convention in 1794, was a liberal-minded man and his prebendary, Dalberg, a vigorous patron of public instruction, belonged to the order of the Illuminati.

Nevertheless the inhabitants of Trier received the French with enthusiasm. The Revolution released the peasants from the trammels of feudalism, gave the bourgeoisie the administrative and legal apparatus they required for their advancement, freed the intelligentsia from the tutelage of the priests. The men of Trier danced round their 'tree of freedom' just like the inhabitants of Mainz. They had their own Jacobin club. Many a respected citizen in the thirties still looked back with pride to his Jacobin past.

Trier remained French for two decades. But as the novelty wore off the things wrought by the Revolution--the dividing-up of Church property in particular--and as the burdens that came in its train increased, the first revolutionary ardour faded, and indifference grew. In the last years of the Napoleonic Empire indifference was replaced by open hostility. Every year the taxes grew more oppressive. The sons of the artisans of Trier and the peasants of the Moselle bled to death on the battlefields of Spain, Germany and Russia. In January, 1815, Trier greeted the Allies as deliverers from an intolerable yoke.

The Congress of Vienna awarded Trier to Prussia. The Prussian Government appreciated the necessity of handling its new-won territory with care. It zealously avoided coming into conflict with the Catholic Church and kept on its guard against injuring the religious susceptibilities of its newly acquired subjects. But it refrained from laying hands on the possessions of those who had grown rich by the acquisition of Church property during the Revolution. In all its essentials the Code Napoléon, the French statute-book, remained in force as far as the Rhineland was concerned. Public and oral court proceedings were retained. The pick of Prussian officialdom was sent to the Rhineland provinces, charged with the duty of scrupulously respecting local idiosyncrasies. For a number of years the Rhineland was sheltered from the full ultra-reactionary blast which set in everywhere else in Prussia immediately after the conclusion of peace.

The Government, tolerant to the Catholic masses, took pains to win over the intelligentsia too. It did a great deal, among other things, for archaeological research. The inhabitants of Trier were proud of the wealth of Roman remains in their town. Scarcely a doctor, lawyer or schoolmaster but was also an historian and archaeologist. The Government provided ample sums of money to subsidise their researches. Instead of agitating against Prussian absolutism, ex-Jacobins burrowed for Mithraic altars and gravestones. In those years the Trier of antiquity, Augusta Treverorum, rose once more from its ruins.

The culture of the vine, mainspring then as now of the agricultural economy of the Moselle, flourished mightily, thanks to the tariff which came into force in 1818. High, almost prohibitive duties closed the Prussian market to foreign wines and provided the peasants of the Moselle with a vast and assured outlet for their produce.

Among those who received the Prussians with the greatest enthusiasm were the Rhineland Jews. In 1815 the economic position of the Jews was incomparably more favourable in the kingdom of Prussia than in most of the departments of France. The Prussian Decree of March 11, 1812, gave them rights that they had enjoyed for only a few years under Napoleon; for practically everything that the Revolution had given them was taken away by the 'décret infâme' of March 17, 1808. Extensive restrictions were placed upon their liberty of movement, and their freedom to trade or earn a living as they wished was as good as abolished. The Jews, at any rate economically, were cast back into the ghetto which they had been preparing to leave. And now the yoke they groaned under was heavier than before. Hitherto the Rhineland Jews had been money-lenders, insisting rigorously upon their bond. But Napoleon compelled them to usury that was secret and obscure. The decree was to last in the first instance for ten years, until 1818. But in 1815 Napoleon fell, and the Jews expected that with him his decree would fall too.

They were disappointed. Article Sixteen of the statutes of the new German Federation of Princes specified that legal rights everywhere should remain as they had been before. Prussia, glad at being able to drop the Liberal mask she had been forced to adopt in the War of Liberation, entered unabashed upon Napoleon's inheritance in so far as it was sufficiently reactionary for her. There was no need whatever to have any consideration for the Jews. So she piled Pelion upon Ossa and superimposed her Old Prussian special Jewish regulations upon those of Napoleon. Under the French Empire it had been possible in exceptional cases for Jews to enter the service of the State; in Prussia, even after the so-called emancipation, it was impossible under any circumstances. So the Rhineland Jews who had entered the State service under Napoleon were compelled to leave it as soon as Frederick William III became their overlord.

The number of those affected was only three, and one of them was a Trier lawyer, Hirschel Marx, the father of Karl. The chairman of the commission which carried out the transfer from French to Prussian authority described him as a 'learned, very industrious and thoroughly conscientious man' and warmly recommended him to be taken over into the Prussian service, but this helped him not at all. In June, 1815, he wrote a memorial in which he expressed his confidence in Prussian justice in moving terms, but he did not receive so much as a reply. Confronted with the choice of changing his faith or his occupation, he had himself baptised and adopted the name of Heinrich.

To abandon the Jewish faith was no great wrench. He did object to the coercion. He was incensed by the narrow intolerance that forced him to this step. No ties bound him to the synagogue, or, for that matter to the church either. True, his ancestors, on his father's and his mother's side alike, had been rabbis as far back as his family-tree can be traced. Hirschel's father, Marx Levy, later known as Marx only, who died in 1798, was a Trier rabbi. The family-tree of Hirschel's mother, Eva Moses Lvov (1753-1823) included a number of celebrated rabbis, including Meir Katzenellenbogen, head of the Talmud School at Padua, who died in 1565, Joseph Ben Gerson ha-Cohen, who died in 1591, and the honoured teacher, Josua Heschel Lvov (1693-1771). The family lived in Hessia, later emigrated to Poland (Lvov is the Polish name for Lemberg) and had been settled in Trier since the seventeenth century. The eldest of Levy's three sons, Samuel, became a rabbi like his fathers before him. He died in Trier in 1827 in his fiftieth year.

Hirschel Marx was born at Saarlouis in 1782. The scanty indications available point to his having early cut himself adrift from his hereditary environment. In a letter to his son he once wrote that but for his existence itself he had received nothing from his family, 'except, to be fair, my mother's love.' His writings contain no word to indicate even the faintest spiritual link with the Jewish faith. Edgar von Westphalen, who spent many hours of his boyhood in the Marxes' house, remembered Heinrich Marx in his old age as a 'Protestant à la Lessing.' A 'real eighteenth-century Frenchman, who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau inside out,' a Kantian like most of the educated people of his town, professing 'a pure belief in God, like Newton, Locke and Leibnitz,' he had nothing whatever in common with the world of rabbinic Jewry. Alienated from his family from his youth up, he had a stony path to tread. In later years he confessed that his 'strong principles' had been his 'only possession.'

His baptism, which took place between the summer of 1816 and the spring of 1817, cut the last loose tie that bound him to his family. If he had hoped before to bring light into the darkness of the ghetto, in spite of being misunderstood, suspected and practically alone, henceforward the task was an impossibility. It was an impossibility not because of his baptism alone. For had the emancipation of the Jews not proved illusory? Was not the dream of their becoming equals among equals over? Now that the door that led from the ghetto to the outer world was once more shut and bolted, the Jews of the ghetto retired into themselves more fanatically than ever. They rejected everything that they had longed for not so long before. They became hyper-orthodox; everything that was traditionally Jewish was sacrosanct, good and bad alike.

We do not know how Marx's father came to terms with it all. But there is an echo in the unwilling words: 'The Hebrew faith is repellent to me,' that Marx wrote at the age of twenty-five. What Marx thought in his young years of the Jewry of his time and country we know from what he wrote in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. 'Let us not search for the secret of the Jews in their religion, but for the secret of their religion in the living Jews,' he wrote. 'What is the worldly foundation of Jewry? Self-interest and the satisfying of practical wants. What is the worldly worship of the Jews? Huckstering. What is their worldly god? Money. Very well. The emancipation from huckstering and money, that is, from real, practical Jewry, would be the real self-emancipation of our time.'

On August 24, 1824, Heinrich Marx's children--Sophie, Karl, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie and Karoline--were received into the national evangelical church. Their mother, Henriette, waited till her parents were dead before being baptised on November 20, 1825. Her maiden name was Pressburg and she came of a family of Hungarian origin which had been settled in Holland for generations.

In the pages that follow there will be little to say about Marx's mother and his brothers and sisters. His mother was a devoted housewife, lovingly concerned for the minor things of life, engrossed in the health, feeding and clothing of her children, narrow-minded if not actually stupid, without any understanding for the daemon of her son. She never forgave him for not becoming a lawyer like his father. She regarded his activities as suspicious from an early age. Measured by her dreams about his future, he was a failure, a genius maybe, but a scapegrace, incompetent, the black sheep of the family, entirely lacking in sense for the only things that she thought sensible, that is to say, a quiet, comfortable life in a narrow circle, respected by the respectable, the well-to-do and the well-bred. When Marx looked back upon his life at the age of fifty he still remembered her saying, in the execrable German that she spoke all her life:

'If Karl had only made capital instead of...'

Not very much is known about Marx's brothers and sisters. The first-born, Moriz David, died soon after birth. The next child was Sophie, born on November 13, 1816. She was, as far as we know, the only one of Karl's brothers and sisters who was at all close to him in his youth. In later years, however, he scarcely even kept in touch with this sister, who married a lawyer named Schmalhausen and lived at Maastricht. Karl was born at half-past one on the morning of May 5, 1818. Of Karl's two younger brothers, Hermann died at the age of twenty-three and Eduard at the age of eleven. Both succumbed to tuberculosis, the hereditary family disease, as did two others [sic] sisters, Henriette and Karoline. Louise, born in 1821, married Jan Karl Juta, a Dutchman, and settled in Cape Town with him. She and her husband twice visited Marx in London, and in 1853 Marx wrote some articles for the Zuid-Afrikaan, which his brother-in-law edited. Emilie, born in 1822, married an engineer named Conradi and lived in Trier until her death in 1888.

In 1815, when the Moselle country became Prussian, Heinrich Marx was a lawyer attached to the Trier court. In 1820 he was attached to the newly founded Trier provincial court. Later he acquired the title of Justizrat and was for many years bâtonnier du barreau. He occupied a respected position in the social life of the town. The family lived in a beautiful old house in the Rhineland baroque style in the Brückenstrasse, one of the best parts of the town. Trier was a small place. In 1818, the year of Marx's birth, it numbered 11,400 inhabitants, of whom the overwhelming majority were Catholic. The Protestant community, to which the Marxes now adhered, consisted of barely three hundred souls, mainly officials transferred to the Moselle from other provinces. In these circumstances the origins of the rabbi's son did not matter. 'Here everyone who conducts himself well is respected,' Ernst von Schiller, the son of Friedrich Schiller, at that time Landgerichtsrat at Trier, wrote at the end of 1820.

At the beginning of 1830 Heinrich Marx was the leader of the moderate constitutional party in Trier. He did not share the francophilia which was still fairly widespread in the Rhineland and became accentuated as the Old Prussian reaction established itself more and more firmly in the new territories.

'Only the hybrid Liberals of to-day could idolise a Napoleon,' he wrote to his son in 1837. 'I assure you that under him no one dared even to think aloud the kind of thing that is daily written in Germany to-day, without hindrance or impediment, in Prussia in particular. He who has studied Napoleon's history and his crazy system of ideas may rejoice with a good conscience at his fall and the victory of Prussia.' He advised the composition of an ode which should extol the victory of the Belle Alliance. The motif he suggested is interesting. 'Its failure would have laid humanity, and the intellect especially, in everlasting chains.' Heinrich Marx preferred enlightened monarchy to military dictatorship, but he was no defender of absolutism.

As the bureaucratic absolutist Prussian régime increasingly demonstrated its incompetence, his antipathy to it grew. Towards the end of the twenties the condition of the peasants of the Moselle took a turn for the worse. In 1828 Prussia formed a Customs Union with Hessia, and in 1834 the German Zollverein was formed. The competition of non-Prussian wine-growing peasants deprived the Moselle of the hitherto certain outlet for its produce, and prices rapidly fell, to the accompaniment of rising taxes. The pauperisation of the peasants of the Moselle proceeded at such a rate that within a few years contemporaries compared their state with the distress of the weavers of Silesia. Trade slumped, the position of the artisans went from bad to worse. The Revolution of July, 1830, in Paris, the setting up of the Bourgeois Kingdom, the September rising in Brussels and the Belgian Declaration of Independence made a profound impression in the Rhineland. In Germany there was unrest in Brunswick, Saxony and Kurhessen. Vintagers from the Moselle area actually took part in the famous Hambacher Fest held by the Liberals on May 27, 1832.

In the Rhineland the old francophile tendencies underwent a mighty revival. New, fantastic, shocking and unprecedented ideas came winging their way across the frontier from France. Saint-Simonism gained so many adherents on the Moselle that the archbishop was compelled to issue an emphatic warning against the new heresy. In 1835 a pamphlet of Ludwig Gall, who has been called the first German Socialist, appeared in Trier. In it he declared that labour was the source of all wealth and that millions owned nothing but their power to work. The pamphlet also contained the following phrases: 'The privileged, moneyed class and the labouring classes, sharply divided as they are by diametrically opposing interests, are in sharp conflict. As the position of the former improves, so does that of the latter worsen, become more wretched and distressed.' The police were aware of Gall's 'very suspicious way of thinking' and perceived that he 'required a specially sharp watch to be kept on him.'

At first the local State officials scarcely altered their policy. Better acquainted than the central authorities in Berlin with conditions in the newly acquired territories, they kept them in ignorance of oppositional utterances for fear of intensifying the situation. This went on until events compelled them to intervene, and in these events Heinrich Marx occupied a prominent place.

The 'Literarische Kasino-Gesellschaft,' a club that dated back to the time of French suzerainty, was the hub of the social life of Trier. Differences of social status were of no account in it. 'Any upright and educated man, without regard to rank or occupation,' was eligible for membership. The club premises consisted of a big, two-storey house, containing a library, a reading-room, in which the principal French and German newspapers were kept, a number of social rooms and a hall in which concerts, theatrical performances and balls were given. 'The Society for Practical Research' (Gesellschaft für nützliche Forschung), which retained strong traditions dating from the time of its foundation in 1802, met at the club. One of its joint founders and most active members was Hugo Wyttenbach, headmaster of Karl Marx's school.

On January 12, 1834, a banquet was held at the club in honour of the deputies to the Rhineland Diet, thus associating the men of Trier with the campaign of banquets which swept South Germany in the winter of 1833-4 under the battle-cry of a constitution. In the opinion of the Prussian authorities this ceremony was quite superfluous; but they did not really become alarmed about it until they discovered that it was not intended to honour all the deputies to the Diet but only the liberal-minded and 'little commendable' Valdenaire, Kaiser and Mohr, while Handel, representative of the Trier nobility, was omitted.

Heinrich Marx was one of the organisers of the banquet and he proposed the toast of the deputies. He paid a glowing tribute to the king 'to whose magnanimity we are indebted for the first institutions of popular representation. In the fullness of his omnipotence he arranged that Diets should assemble so that truth might arrive at the steps of the throne.' He concluded with the words: 'So let us look confidently forward to a serene future, for it rests in the hands of a worthy father, an upright king, whose noble heart will always remain open and well-disposed to the just and reasonable wishes of his people.'

A very loyal speech, to be sure, yet the voice of the opposition was plainly to be discerned in it. The party of ultra-reaction in Berlin wanted to have the Rhenish Diet abolished, or at least have its privileges circumscribed as far as possible. Therefore praising the king for having sanctioned the Diet was equivalent to protesting against the royal plan to suppress it. The president of the administrative district was forced to abandon his previous practice and report the matter to Berlin. There could be no good purpose behind the banquet, which was a small-scale imitation of similar affairs in the Southern German States. But it was the only one of its kind in Prussia. The Trier Press was not allowed to report it, but the newspapers of Cologne and Coblenz carried detailed descriptive reports of it, and even the Paris Constitutionnel, the organ of the Left, announced that the inhabitants of Trier had held a 'brilliant banquet' at which 'speeches of the most Liberal purport' were delivered. Kamptz, the Minister of justice, rightly interpreted the pious words. 'They imagine themselves not just deputies to the Diet but representatives of the people, and accordingly receive the civic crown.'

Soon afterwards, to crown the intense disapproval with which the Government regarded the banquet and the speeches made at it, a new sensation arose. On January 20 the club anniversary celebrations were held and became exuberant. The company drank, sang and made merry. They grew over-bold and started singing not just German songs but French--the Marseillaise and the Parisienne. An officer reported the matter. Heinrich Marx was among those who sang and made depreciatory references to the Prussians. At this the whole official apparatus was set in motion. The ministry in Berlin intervened, the Crown Prince, Frederick William, wrote an indignant letter to the burgomaster, describing the songs that were sung as 'heinous, the apotheosis of ancient and modern perfidy,' and a detailed report of the matter was made to the king himself. Officers and State officials who had been members of the club resigned and the premises were placed under police supervision. From that day on Heinrich Marx was regarded by the Government as thoroughly unreliable politically. Young Karl, then aged sixteen, cannot have failed to follow these events, in which his father was so closely concerned, with great attention.

Karl Marx was devoted to his father. His daughter Eleanor recalled that he never tired of talking about him. 'He always carried with him a photograph of his father which was taken from an old daguerreotype. But he was never willing to show it to strangers, because, he said, it bore so little resemblance to the original. To me the face appeared very fine. The eyes and forehead resembled those of his son, but the part of the face round the mouth and the chin were gentler. His features as a whole were of a definitely Jewish, but fine Jewish type. When Karl Marx started the long, sorrowful journey in search of health after his wife's death, this photograph, an old photograph of my mother on glass and a photograph of my sister, Jenny, went with him. We found them in his breast-pocket after his death. Engels laid them in his coffin.'

More detailed knowledge of Marx's boyhood would be welcome, but all that has come down to us is a few meagre, disconnected reminiscences by his sisters. They show him as an unruly companion at play. He seems to have been a fearful tyrant. He drove the girls at full gallop down the Marxberg and insisted on their eating the cakes he made with his dirty hands out of still dirtier dough. But they put up with it all without a protest because he told them such marvellous stories in return. His schoolmates loved him and feared him at the same time--loved him because he was always up to tricks and feared him because of the ease with which he wrote satirical verses and lampoons upon his enemies. He retained this ability during the whole of his life.

Karl Marx was sent to the high grammar school, in 1830. He was a moderate pupil. The best pupils were singled out at the end of each school year. Marx once received an 'honourable mention' for ancient and modern languages, but he was only tenth on the list. Another time he was singled out for his good performances at German composition. This was not much for five years at school. He passed his examinations without distinction. There is some evidence to indicate that he had the reputation, among schoolfellows and masters alike, of being a poet. After Karl's departure to Bonn University, when his father gave Wyttenbach, his old headmaster, his son's greetings and told him that Karl intended to write a poem in his honour, 'it made the old man happy.'

Whether the poem was ever written is unknown. The intention alone points to a definite political outlook. Wyttenbach was the life and soul of a group of Kantians which had been formed in Trier in the first years of the new century. Marx's father belonged to it himself. Wyttenbach, scholar, historian, archaeologist and humanist, educated his pupils in a free, cosmopolitan spirit, entirely dissimilar to that prevailing in the royal Prussian high schools. He had a high conception of his calling, as is demonstrated by the speeches he made each year at the ceremonial departure to the university of the pupils who were leaving. These were always fully reported in the Trier newspapers. 'A teacher cannot alter a child's individuality,' he said. 'But he can thwart or help it, cripple or develop it.' The wearisome phrases about throne and altar, prevalent, nay, actually prescribed at the time, were never used by him.

The police did not concern themselves with the high school until 1830. The Prussian authorities, in conformity with the duty incumbent upon them of winning over their new subjects, shut their eyes and let Wyttenbach do as he liked. After 1830 this state of affairs altered. The persecution of the 'demagogues' began. A commission 'for the suppression of politically dangerous groups' had been established in Berlin. It directed its attention to Trier. Schnabel, the administrative head of the district of Saarbrucken, with whom denouncing was a passion, had all and sundry spied upon by his agent, a degenerate individual named Nohl.

Nohl sent his denunciations to Berlin by way of Schnabel week by week. No one was safe, neither doctor nor artisan nor innkeeper nor official, nor even the wife of the president of the administrative district. All were demagogues and Jacobins. The Coblenz school committee tried to defend their traduced colleagues, but it helped them little. The local officials, intimidated, dismayed, unsure what course to steer, admitted that there were some partially 'ill-disposed' members of the high school staff. Many of them were said to exercise a 'bad influence' upon the boys. One master, Steininger, who taught Marx natural science and mathematics, had 'an innate propensity to opposition' and Wyttenbach was too weak and, moreover, protected his colleagues when anything against them was ventured upon. A deplorable lack of discipline was to be observed among the pupils. Boys of the top forms were sometimes to be seen sitting about in the taverns until after midnight and, what was far worse, forbidden literature circulated among them. A copy of the speeches made at the Hambacher Fest in 1833 was found in a boy's possession. In 1834 it was discovered that the boys actually wrote poems with political implications. One was arrested and was in the remand prison for months.

Henceforth the Coblenz school committee and the Trier officials kept the school under zealous observation. Between 1833 and 1835 it was the subject of dozens of official reports.

These were Marx's last years at school. There can be no doubt of the interest with which he must have followed these events, which so closely concerned his masters, his schoolfellows and himself. True, his name does not occur in the official correspondence, but the official correspondence contains the names of no schoolboys at all. He is certain to have made rich use of his gift of writing lampoons upon his enemies.

The essays he wrote at his final examination cast a light upon his mentality at the time. The influence of the French liberal intelligence, particularly that of Rousseau, imparted by his father and Wyttenbach, is plain enough. Of greater significance are these phrases from an essay called 'Observations of a young man before choosing a career.'

'If we choose the career in which we can do humanity the most good, burdens cannot overwhelm us, since they are nothing but sacrifices for the benefit of all. ... Experience rates him as the happiest who has made the greatest number happy, and religion itself teaches us the ideal for which all strive, to sacrifice oneself for humanity.'

The only upholders of these ideals at that time were the Left, the members of the 'Burschenschaft,' and the revolutionaries who hungered in exile. In their appeals to youth the words: be ready to sacrifice yourself, renounce your well-being for humanity's sake, constantly recur. They remained the fundamental maxim of Marx's life. Paul Lafargue records that 'to work for humanity' was his favourite motto.

The spy's reports about the masters at his school turned out to be grossly exaggerated. Investigation showed that 'no good spirit was prevalent' among the boys, but that there was nothing tangible against the staff Wyttenbach was not dismissed, as the more extreme among his enemies demanded. But he was given a joint headmaster, Loers, the Latin master, a 'well-disposed man,' whose duty it was to preside over the school discipline.

Loers's appointment became known just as Karl left school. It gave him a welcome opportunity of making a demonstration--an innocuous demonstration, it is true, but the Prussian Government allowed no others. The Government were not blind to the state of mind expressed in such demonstrations, nor were they intended to be.

It was usual for young men just going to the university to call on their old masters to say good-bye. Marx visited every one of them but Loers. 'Herr Loers took it very much amiss that you did not go and see him,' Heinrich Marx wrote to his son at Bonn. 'You and Clemens were the only ones.' He told a white lie and said that Karl had gone with him to call on Loers, but unfortunately he had been out.

In the middle of October, 1835, Karl Marx went to Bonn.