In London the saddest trials awaited him, for poverty, gloomy companion,
sat ever at his board from the day of his entry into the British capital
down to the hour of his last breath. One after another of his children
died in the unwholesome dwellings of his exile, and he was forced to beg
from friends and comrades the scanty coins needed to pay for their
burial; he and his family had to make the best of a diet of bread and
potatoes; he was forced to pawn his watch and his clothing, to sell his
books, to tramp the streets in search of any help that might offer; the
day came when, under the lash of hunger, he was compelled to contemplate
seeking work as railway clerk, of placing his daughters out to service,
of making them governesses or actresses, whilst himself retiring with
his unhappy wife to dwell in the proletarian quarter of Whitechapel.
The severity of these sufferings did much to add a tinge of gall to a
character naturally acerb, a character which amid the upheavals and
horrors of exile frequently showed itself far from amiable. Mingled
sentiments of grief and anger fill our minds when, in Marx's private
letters to Engels, we trace the manifestations of this harshness, which
left him unmoved by the misfortunes of his dearest friends, which led
him to make any use he could of these friends and then to overwhelm them
with reproaches and accusations, which showed itself (and this is the
worst of all) in a jealous hatred of comrades less unfortunate than
himself. Deplorable from every point of view was his conduct towards
Freiligrath and Lassalle, in especial towards Lassalle, who had shown
him the utmost friendliness, had given him ample financial assistance,
had entertained him in Berlin, had helped him to find a publisher; for
Marx subsequently censured Lassalle's works with much acrimony, beheld
his triumphs askance, and commented upon the incidents of Lassalle's
death in a tone of tepid apology. But you well-fed folk who amid easy
circumstances are studying the life of our agitator, be not too ready to
blame him, and before stoning him bethink yourselves of all the miseries
the exile must suffer, of all the tortures amid which he must bear his
cross.
Vainly did he endeavour by hard work to free himself from the sad
restraints of poverty. It is true he was able to place articles with the
"New York Tribune," writing for this paper essays on political,
economic, and financial questions, which secured much appreciation. But
the pay was only one pound per article, and he could write but one
article a week. Collaboration in the production of an American
encyclopædia, to be paid at the rate of two dollars a page, seemed to
promise more ample funds, and with feverish anxiety he devoted himself
to the production of articles on the most varied topics, well stored
with facts. But this source of income, limited at best, was suddenly
interrupted by the outbreak of the American civil war. The loss was not
adequately compensated by the possibility of occasionally inserting some
poorly paid contribution in a German newspaper like the "New Oder
Gazette" or in one of the Viennese periodicals.
He was lucky in that certain turns of fortune favoured him from those
sources of property and inheritance which he condemned and attacked with
such persistence and vehemence. He had a legacy from his mother-in-law;
a legacy from his mother; a trifling legacy from an aunt; and Wilhelm
Wolff, a companion in exile, bequeathed him £800. An uncle in Holland,
whom he had begged for some trifling help, gave him £160; from Lassalle
and Freiligrath came generous gifts; and Droncke, another companion in
exile, gave £250 to enable him to complete the scientific work on which
he was engaged.
But none of these casual resources, however extensive, would have saved
him from ruin had it not been for the providential assistance of his
friend Friedrich Engels, who applied himself to the care of Marx with
inexhaustible generosity, and with the tenderness of a woman. Engels,
indeed, will secure a splendid place in the history of socialist
thought, were it only because of the way in which he devoted himself to
Marx. It was through Engels that Marx was enabled to continue his
studies and to complete the work which is his title to eternal fame.
Engels, a well-to-do cotton spinner at Manchester, gladly responded to
his friend's unremitting requests for aid, succouring him in every
emergency. Engels was an expert upon military topics, and penned
articles which Marx passed on to the "Tribune" and to the encyclopædia,
articles for which Marx was paid; Engels sent Marx weekly subsidies, and
frequently despatched gifts of port wine; he made presents of £100 or
£150 at a time; and at length, when his business prospered, he gave his
friend a regular allowance of £350 a year.
Not even these strokes of good luck sufficed, it is true, to restore a
satisfactory balance to Marx's finances, for he was a bad manager, and
the disorder was probably incurable. However, they enabled our thinker
to furnish aid to companions yet more unfortunate, to Pieper, Eccarius,
and Dupont; they enabled him to escape from the worst extremities of
poverty and to establish himself in life under conditions more worthy of
an honest and respectable bourgeois. He was able to move from the
decayed neighbourhood of Soho Square and to settle in Maitland Park Road
on Haverstock Hill; it became possible for him to secure a good
education for his daughters, to have them taught French and Italian,
drawing and music; he could weigh the financial status of aspirants to
their hands, and could choose Lafargue and Longuet, who were
comparatively well off. He often went to the theatre, and with one of
his daughters he attended at the Society of Arts a soirée graced by the
presence of royalty; from time to time he took his family to the
seaside; he liked his wife to sign herself "Jenny, née Baronne de
Westphalen"; he was well received in affluent circles, and was
frequently consulted by the "Times" upon financial affairs; finally he
accepted the office of constable of the vestry of St. Pancras, taking
the customary oath, and donning the regulation uniform on gala
occasions.
Nevertheless, neither this final settlement in a foreign land nor the
persecution he suffered from the government of his own country could
destroy or even lessen his devotion to Germany. To the day of his death
he remained a faithful child of the fatherland, for which he hoped the
greatest of futures. He sang the praises of German music and literature;
he delighted in German victories and German expansion; he dreaded a
weakening of German protectionism which might strengthen the commercial
hegemony of Britain; and in 1870 he refused to sign an appeal in favour
of peace unless it were definitely stated that Germany was waging a
purely defensive war. The French and Russian exiles in London were
indignant, and circulated whispers that Marx was a Prussian emissary,
and had received a bribe of £10,000. An idle tale! It is true that among
German conservatives and among the beneficiaries of Germany there could
not be found a supporter more sincere and more fervent than was this
proscribed rebel. But he was no paladin on behalf of Prussian
imperialism, as we can learn beyond dispute from a letter he sent to
the "Daily News" in 1878 denouncing Bismarckian ambitions and the
Bismarckian expansionist policy as a growing peril.
Yet the supreme aim of his activity and his life enormously transcended
the circumscribed range of country and of nation, for he aspired to a
loftier goal, to the organisation of the mental and manual workers of
all countries so that they might constitute a united revolutionary
force. Within a brief time of his arrival in the British metropolis he
again became the chief, nay the dictator, of a circle to which none
could be admitted without passing a severe examination as to knowledge
of science in general and of political economy in particular, an
examination so rigorous that even Wilhelm Liebknecht was unable at first
to satisfy its requirements, an examination that was physical as well as
mental, for the aspirants were subjected (rejoice, shade of Lombroso!)
to precise craniometrical tests.
Thus our thinker, crowned as if by divine right with a kind of imperial
halo, exercised undisputed sway over the troop of exiles, Pieper, Bauer,
Blind, Biskamp, Eccarius, Liebknecht, Freiligrath, Cesare Orsini
(brother of the regicide), and even over the revolutionary agitators in
Germany. Soon, however, his mind was invaded and dominated by a yet more
ambitious design, for he planned the formation of a society which should
unite the proletarians of all the world into one formidable
International, to resist the aggressions of capital and to work for the
destruction of the capitalist system. It was at first an association of
modest proportions, consisting merely of a few revolutionaries assembled
in London. Marx absolutely refused the chairmanship, contenting himself
with the post, ostensibly less important, of delegate for the German
section.
From the first formation of the new federation Marx did his utmost to
counteract the influence of Mazzini, for Mazzini, through the
instrumentality of two of his followers, Fontana and the elder Wolff,
wished to inspire the International with his idealist conceptions and to
initiate it into the secrets of conspiracy. Marx, on the other hand, was
unwearying in his efforts to advocate his own view that material
interests preponderate, and that these interests must be publicly
asserted and defended in the arena of history. Soon the federation
established branches in France, Germany, the United States, and even the
Latin countries; and this involved for Marx, who was really the chief, a
mass of work in the way of organisation, and of struggle against those
who held conflicting views. Everywhere, in fact, he had to encounter
trends differing from his own, and differing no less extensively one
from another owing to the varying characters of the countries concerned.
In Germany he had to fight the opportunism of Lassalle, a man inclined
to compromises and to elastic unions with constituted authority. In
France anti-intellectual tendencies were already manifest, so that there
was an inclination to restrict the socialist outlook to an aspiration
for immediately practical labour legislation of minor importance. In
Italy and in Spain, Marx's troubles arose from the anarchist tendencies
characteristic of those countries, tendencies fostered by the propaganda
of Bakunin.
As against these divergent aims, Marx, with inflexible tenacity,
maintained his own programme with the utmost rigour, insisting that it
was essential to federate the proletarian forces of the world into an
invincible organisation which in all possible ways, by strikes, by
parliamentary and legal methods, but also by force should need arise,
should deliver onslaughts upon the bourgeoisie and upon constituted
authority, should exact concessions of increasing importance, and should
ultimately secure a complete triumph. The proletarians of the two
hemispheres were not slow to accept the programme; and this man who was
himself suffering from actual hunger, now secured a great position as a
thinker, so that the operatives of Paris, New York, and Düsseldorf did
honour to his name.
These activities, however, did not completely interrupt his intellectual
labours, for during the period at which we have now arrived he published
in the "New York Tribune" a series of articles upon _Revolution and
Counter-revolution in Germany_ and upon _Political Struggles in France_.
In 1852, in "The Revolution," published in the German tongue in New
York, there had appeared the article _The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte_. Substantially these writings are an application of the
materialist conception of history to the more conspicuous events of the
recent political history of Germany and of France. In addition, Marx
published in the "Tribune" a series of articles of a more distinctively
political character, dealing with _The Eastern Question_, displaying
marvellous erudition and a wonderful power of forecasting events.