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 misunder 
standings 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 pre 
tension 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 West- 
phalen, 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^