prejudice
against their employment, and the anti-war attitude of the
international proletariat has been supplemented and strengthened by
the distinct growth of an international peace spirit in certain
sections of the middle class. So that in spite of superficial
appearances it does not seem to be so very unlikely that the action of
the dialectic will be manifest in the destruction of modern armaments,
at least as far as the greater nations are concerned, though there is
little doubt that military forces will still be maintained for the
purpose of bullying and overawing the smaller and weaker peoples.

Mention has already been made of the fact that Engels never really
divested himself of the old "forty-eight" spirit. The notion that a
revolution would break out somewhere in the near future finds a
curiously fixed, if unexpressed, lodgment in his mind. One cannot help
feeling that he expected things to mature earlier than they have done
and that he anticipated that changes in the mode of production and the
development of industry would have made a stronger impression upon the
mind of the proletarian than history shows to have been the case. This
latent, but still persistent, notion is in curious contrast to the
almost detached way in which, particularly in his later years, he
views the course of economic and political events. He never really in
fact divested his mind of the notion of the imminence of social
revolution, for in his 1892 preface to "The Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844" he says, "I have taken care not to strike
out of the text the many prophecies, amongst others that of an
imminent social revolution in England, which my youthful ardor induced
me to venture upon." His youthful ardor seems never to have really
abated in that respect. The dreams of boyhood seem to have haunted him
and the old fighter stirred uneasily in his study chair at the echoes
of past conflicts in which he also heard the bugles of the coming
fight. To those who have watched the development of Engels' thought,
as shown in his works, this philosophic, unemotional way of looking at
things proves the effect of experience and age upon the fighter. He
started with a heart inflamed with the wrongs of the suffering, as the
damning pages of the work above cited show; he ends with a calm and
dispassionate enquiry (apart from what he considered to be the
exigencies of controversy) into the fundamental causes of economic and
social