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34 worked amongst the progressive elements in the labor movement of this city, and to the critical analysis of Proudhon's middle-class Utopianism, he adds a scathing refutation of the confused, hazy sentimental German Communism of the Weitling school. His lectures on "Wage-Labor and Capital," held before a Democratic Workingmen's Club, and the speech on "Free Trade"; also the treatise on "Free Trade or Protective Tariff," published in the "Deutschen Brüsseler Zeitung," show the marked and growing interest which Marx begins to manifest for economic problems. We note here the penetrating thoroughness with which he visualizes and dissects capitalist production, in order to intelligently appreciate its historic character, and in order to be able to define and deduce therefrom the position of the proletariat to the miscellaneous questions of the day. Through their untiring activity and distinguished faculties, Marx and Engels quickly became the centre of a brilliant circle of intellectuals in Brussels. This circle was made up of heterogeneous elements, including impatient Democrats and Socialists from the various parts of Germany, amongst them Wilhelm Wolf, to whom Marx later dedicated his masterpiece "Capital," Moses Hess, Robert Weitling, Ferdinand Freiligrath and others. And through his personal agitation and influence, even more so than through his contributions to the "Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung," Marx shaped and molded the intellectual development of these German, Russian and French exiles and revolutionists, and thus actually prepared and assisted in whipping on the evolution of things in these countries. In the Rhineland, Westphalia, Silesia and other parts of Germany his friends and disciples were openly or secretly carrying on the propaganda, always in the thickest of the fray, and thus their call and agitation very ominously announces the approach of the revolutionary year.

The first victory for Marxist principles—a victory of international magnitude—was scored, when Marx and Engels received an encouraging invitation from England. London had been for years the seat of a society calling itself the League of the Just.