which in their totality furnish the sum-total of this turbulent life, let us subject the immediate and also the larger social environment out of which and in which Marx grew and developed to a casual examination. I believe, it is quite essential to have at least a general knowledge of the social and historic background overshadowing and influencing every step in the life of this genius, before you will be able to comprehend and appreciate the detailed phases of his tumultuous career intelligently.
Considering Marx's parentage, Klara Zetkin, a profound Marxian scholar, remarks: "The customary theories fail us, when we propound the question how this great personality, this genial thinker, grew and came to be. The parents of Marx were good and intelligent folks, although in no sense intellectually superior to the average. Neither do the family annals of either mother or father point to any ancestor whose intellectual endowments and characteristics remind us of or are comparable to Marx's."
Wilhelm Liebknecht, who for years shared the hard days of exile with Marx in London, writing on this subject states: "On the 5th of May, 1818, at Treves—the oldest German town—among the monuments of Roman civilization and amid the recent traces of the French Revolution that had cleaned the Rhenish province of medieval rubbish, a son was born in a Jewish family: Karl Marx. Only four years had passed since the province of the Rhine had been occupied by Prussia, and the new masters hastened, in the service of the "Holy Alliance," to replace the Heathenish-French by a Christian-German spirit. The pagan Frenchmen had proclaimed the equal rights of all human beings in the German Rhineland, and had removed from the Jews the curse of a thousand years' persecution and oppression, had made citizens and human beings of them. The Christian-German spirit of the "Holy Alliance" condemned the Heathenish-French spirit of equalization and demanded renovation of the old curse.
"Shortly after the birth of the boy, an edict was issued leaving
