blood was shed because of him. But, little by
little, his teaching seems to have leavened the thought of the whole
civilized world, so that to-day thousands who barely know his name are
deeply affected by his ideas, and believe that the state should control
and manage everything for the good of all.

Marx seems to have inherited little from either of his parents. His
father, Heinrich Marx, was a provincial Jewish lawyer who had adopted
Christianity, probably because it was expedient, and because it enabled
him to hold local offices and gain some social consequence. He had
changed his name from Mordecai to Marx.

The elder Marx was very shrewd and tactful, and achieved a fair position
among the professional men and small officials in the city of Treves.
He had seen the horrors of the French Revolution, and was philosopher
enough to understand the meaning of that mighty upheaval, and of the
Napoleonic era which followed.

Napoleon, indeed, had done much to relieve his race from petty
oppression. France made the Jews in every respect the equals of the
Gentiles. One of its ablest marshals--Massena--was a Jew, and therefore,
when the imperial eagle was at the zenith of its flight, the Jews in
every city and town of Europe were enthusiastic admirers of Napoleon,
some even calling him the Messiah.

Karl Marx's mother, it is certain, endowed him with none of his gifts.
She was a Netherlandish Jewess of the strictly domestic and conservative
type, fond of her children and her home, and detesting any talk that
looked to revolutionary ideas or to a change in the social order. She
became a Christian with her husband, but the word meant little to her.
It was sufficient that she believed in God; and for this she was teased
by some of her skeptical friends. Replying to them, she uttered the only
epigram that has ever been ascribed to her.

"Yes," she said, "I believe in God, not for God's sake, but for my own."

She was so little affected by change of scene that to the day of her
death she never mastered German, but spoke almost wholly in her native
Dutch. Had we time, we might dwell upon the unhappy paradox of her life.
In her son Karl she found an especial joy, as did her husband. Had the
father lived beyond Karl's early youth, he would doubtless have been
greatly pained by the radicalism of his gifted son, as well as by his
personal privations. But the mother lived until 1863, while Karl was
everywhere stirring the fires of