ed a fairly large library--one of more than two
hundred thousand volumes--to seek the little brochure on Karl Marx
written by his old friend and genial comrade Wilhelm Liebknecht. It was
in the card catalogue. As I made a note of its number, my friend the
librarian came up to me, and I asked him whether it was not strange
that a man like Marx should have so many books devoted to him, for I
had roughly reckoned the number at several hundred.

"Not at all," said he; "and we have here only a feeble nucleus of the
Marx literature--just enough, in fact, to give you a glimpse of what
that literature really is. These are merely the books written by Marx
himself, and the translations of them, with a few expository
monographs. Anything like a real Marx collection would take up a
special room in this library, and would have to have its own separate
catalogue. You see that even these two or three hundred books contain
large volumes of small pamphlets in many languages--German, English,
French, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish;
and here," he concluded, pointing to a recently numbered card, "is one
in Japanese."

My curiosity was sufficiently excited to look into the matter somewhat
further. I visited another library, which was appreciably larger, and
whose managers were evidently less guided by their prejudices. Here
were several thousand books on Marx, and I spent the best part of the
day in looking them over.

What struck me as most singular was the fact that there was scarcely a
volume about Marx himself. Practically all the books dealt with his
theory of capital and his other socialistic views. The man himself, his
personality, and the facts of his life were dismissed in the most
meager fashion, while his economic theories were discussed with
something that verged upon fury. Even such standard works as those of
Mehring and Spargo, which profess to be partly biographical, sum up the
personal side of Marx in a few pages. In fact, in the latter's preface
he seems conscious of this defect, and says:

Whether socialism proves, in the long span of centuries, to be good or
evil, a blessing to men or a curse, Karl Marx must always be an object
of interest as one of the great world-figures of immortal memory. As
the years go by, thoughtful men and women will find the same interest
in studying the life and work of Marx that they do in studying the life
and work of Cromwell, of Wesley, or of Darwin, to na