en the latter discovered a royal patron.
Both of them were hounded from country to country; both of them
worked laboriously for so scanty a living as to verge, at times, upon
starvation. Both of them were victims to a cause in which they earnestly
believed--an economic cause in the one case, an artistic cause in
the other. Wagner's triumph came before his death, and the world has
accepted his theory of the music-drama. The cause of Marx is far greater
and more tremendous, because it strikes at the base of human life and
social well-being.

The clash between Wagner and his critics was a matter of poetry and
dramatic music. It was not vital to the human race. The cause of Marx
is one that is only now beginning to be understood and recognized by
millions of men and women in all the countries of the earth. In
his lifetime he issued a manifesto that has become a classic among
economists. He organized the great International Association of Workmen,
which set all Europe in a blaze and extended even to America. His great
book, "Capital"--Das Kapital--which was not completed until the last
years of his life, is read to-day by thousands as an almost sacred work.

Like Wagner and his Minna, the wife of Marx's youth clung to him through
his utmost vicissitudes, denying herself the necessities of life so that
he might not starve. In London, where he spent his latest days, he was
secure from danger, yet still a sort of persecution seemed to follow
him. For some time, nothing that he wrote could find a printer. Wherever
he went, people looked at him askance. He and his six children lived
upon the sum of five dollars a week, which was paid him by the New York
Tribune, through the influence of the late Charles A. Dana. When his
last child was born, and the mother's life was in serious danger, Marx
complained that there was no cradle for the baby, and a little later
that there was no coffin for its burial.

Marx had ceased to believe in marriage, despised the church, and cared
nothing for government. Yet, unlike Wagner, he was true to the woman who
had given up so much for him. He never sank to an artistic degeneracy.
Though he rejected creeds, he was nevertheless a man of genuine
religious feeling. Though he believed all present government to be an
evil, he hoped to make it better, or rather he hoped to substitute for
it a system by which all men might get an equal share of what it is
right and just for them to have.

Such was Marx,