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Rh ical Materialism penetrated the superficial but popular misconceptions of political issues; everywhere they laid open the deeper, underlying laws of social activity; and everywhere they traced the basic force, animating this activity and formulating these issues, to the material conditions in society. And when Marx ascertained the factors governing social activity and found them to rest in the prevailing system of production of a given historic period, then he had also found answer to the question of the ultimate outcome of the class war: an. answer that contained the goal and course for future working-class activity.

It is to Frederick Engels that Marx owes the fruitful suggestions which led to this epoch-making and revolutionary discovery. Engels, filled with libertarian aspirations and in his "Sturm und Drang" phase of life, had come to Paris in 1844. He became acquainted with Marx and quickly attached to him. This acquaintance was to result into a lifelong friendship: a friendship that was to be cemented by many years of literary collaboration and activity in the labor movement, and which furnishes silent testimony to the beautiful devotion with which these master-minds served the cause embodying their principles and ideals—the cause of the disinherited and exploited workers. Engels was also a graduate from the Hegelian school. It was, however, not History which had sharpened and trained his vision to perceive the laws of social development, but the industrial conditions of highly developed capitalist England. Engels was the son of a prominent manufacturer in Barmen, a highly developed industrial city in the Rhenish Province, who entertained quite some business relations with England and had a branch office of his undertaking in Manchester. Actual business practice had given him a thorough insight into the structure and the various phases of capitalism, and upon this solid foundation he based his final conceptions of the role played by the conditions of production and exchange in historical evolution. In conjunction with these practical observations, the fearful effects of the capitalist system in England flashed the importance of private