Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/4

 conscious proletariat of the world received such sorrowful news.

The whole life of Frederick Engels was given up to the emancipation of the laboring class. He stood with Karl Marx by the side of the cradle of the modern labor movement. Their fate was inseparably united with that of the International Social Democracy. Their writings laid the scientific foundation upon which socialism is built. From their works proceeded the clear knowledge which divided the modern social democracy from the dreams of the Utopians. Both were teachers of the laboring class, unfolding to them the actual relation of things. Both were tireless fighters for the rights of the laboring people. They sharpened the sword for us and taught us how to use it. Marx and Engels are the spiritual leaders of the international proletariat, whose inner life they knew better than any one else. When Engels, hitherto so robust, sank into his grave, his loss was mourned by the laborers of the world and their sorrow knew no bounds of land or speech.

Intellectual gifts were lavished upon Frederick Engels. A thorough education embracing every department of human knowledge was accompanied by a rare capacity for theoretic thought. All partiality was foreign to his universal mind; he investigated the material forces which move mankind, and busied himself with the deepest problems of philosophy. At the time he was writing political pamphlets he was studying also mathematics, physics, chemistry and military history. The same man who investigated the secrets of capitalistic production studied the tactics of the contesting armies of 1870. The thinker who wrote like a native of the political and industrial condition of Russia worked at the same time on ancient history. His mind, while comprehending all the details of practical politics, was no less capable of taking part in the highest problems of thought. And all that he thought, said, wrote or did was dedicated to suffering and struggling humanity. As a youth he fought, weapon in hand, for the freedom of the oppressed, and until his last days his thoughts were ever with the laboring class. His life was devoted to Socialism, and a knowledge of his career is a history of Socialism during the last fifty years.

No one has depicted with greater accuracy and love the life and works of Frederick Engels, his services for the Socialist movement and his relation to its existence and growth, than Karl Kautsky, in an article entitled "Frederick Engels,"