Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/31

 to be by letter during the winter and in person during the summer. For this reason and also because of the necessity of following the movement in an ever-increasing number of countries and organs of the press, it became impossible for me to undertake any labors demanding uninterrupted attention at any other time than in winter, and especially in the first three months of the year."

These difficulties of which he tells us were not his only ones or even his greatest. Dr. Adler has strikingly called attention to this in the Vienna "Arbeiterzeitung":

The publication of the second and third volumes of "Capital" was the last great gift of Engels to the proletariat. We speak of it as a "publication," but it was really a new creation; in spite of the fact that Engels, with that modesty which is only the possession of great spirits, always belittled his activity as compared to that of his friend. He has, as no other could have done, followed the course of thought through the fragments, extracts and observations that were left behind, and completed the last two volumes of "Capital." The greater part of the material was, so far as the form of the language was concerned, merely hastily thrown together, a simple jotting down of the thoughts as they passed through the mind of Marx—not arranged; in some points almost completely worked out, in others merely fixed by catchwords, partly German, partly English and French, often almost unintelligibly written. To follow out the method laid down in the first book, which dealt with the process of production in a masterly analysis of the process of circulation of capital, and develop from the material left behind the further course of surplus value, the division of profit into rent and entrepreneur wage, and the doctrine of ground rent, was a task that not only required the highest physical exertion, but a brain power not inferior to that of the original composer. Engels was the only one capable of this, for no other living person was so in accord with the author in the method of reasoning and the views, to the smallest details, of the relations in the economic development of capitalism. In the last two volumes of "Capital" Engels erected to the memory of Marx a more enduring monument than any cast in bronze, and, without so intending, carved upon it in imperishable letters his own name as well. Just as in life Marx and Engels were inseparable, so "Capital" cannot bear the name of either alone, but must always be known in the history of political economy as the "Capital" of Marx and Engels. And although Engels has marked with