KARL  MARX.

21

to  enable  conclusions  to  be  drawn  from  them  with  certainty.
As  M.  H.  Passy  justly  remarks,  if  too  short,  definitions  are
false,  because  they  do  not  take  exceptions  into  account  ;  if  too
long,  they  perplex  and  serve  no  purpose.  The  best  plan  is
to  use  words  in  their  usual  sense,  to  employ  concrete  terms
that  everybody  understands,  and  to  avoid  as  far  as  possible
abstract  and  general  expressions  which  give  rise  to  frequent
mistakes  and  bootless  discussions.  Thus  contests  are  always
arising  among  economists  as  to  what  is  to  be  understood  by
“capital”  and  “rent”  Why  not  simply  say,  food,  machines,
tools,  money  or  income,  and  the  produce  of  land  ?  It
would  take  a  little  longer,  but  it  would  be  much  more  clear.
Bossuet  and  Pascal  did  not  employ  vague  abstract  terms  ;  they
always  expressed  themselves  in  an  incisive  and  intelligible
manner.  To  confine  one’s  self  to  the  language  of  the  seventeenth
century  would  suffice  to  put  an  end  to  most  of  the  misunderstandings ­
  and  idle  discussions  which  encumber  Political
Economy,  and  to  render  impossible  such  mistakes  as  are  to
be  found  in  Das  Kapital.
What  made  Karl  Marx  one  of  the  leaders  of  European
Socialism  was  that  he  was  the  founder  and  organizer  of  the
International.  There  is  nothing  of  the  .revolutionary  agitator
either  in  his  writings  or  in  his  life.  His  books  have  the  pretension ­
  of  being  purely  scientific,  and  his  life,  after  some
stormy  incidents,  was  .that  of  a  scholar  pursuing  his  favourite
studies  in  peaceful  seclusion.
Marx  was  born  at  Trêves,  on  the  2nd  May,  1818.  His
father,  a  baptized  Jew,  was  an  inspector  of  mines.  Karl
studied  law  with  great  success  at  the  university  of  Bonn,  and
after  returning  to  Trêves,  married,  in  1843,  Jenny  von  Westphalen,
  sister  of  the  Count  von  Westphalen,  who  had  been
a  member  of  the  Manteuffel  ministry,  and  who  had  recently
died.  He  refused  the  advantageous  posts  held  out  to  him
in  the  service  of  the  State  in  order  to  give  himself  entirely
up  to  studying  Political  Economy,  and  in  particular  the  social
question.  Prosecuted  by  the  Prussian  Government  for  his
extreme  opinions,  he  took  refuge  in  Paris,  and  there  published,
jointly  with  Arnold  Ruge,  the  Deutsch-Französische  yahrbücher^