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Rh scientific conviction and unhampered investigation were everything, and with sovereign scorn did he look down upon and treat that so numerous tribe of professorial scribes, who sell these indispensable prerequisites of liberty for the proverbial mess of pottage. And just because Marx was a searching scientist and his scientific findings made out of him a revolutionist, that is why he was ostracized by the class which to-day, by virtue of its economic power, is in control of the institutions of learning: that is why Marx was condemned to battle with the most dire poverty during the greatest part of his life.

To Marx, however, poverty was an incident of secondary importance and considered the legitimate product of a social manifestation of prime significance to him, and that was the movement—his ideal. Marx, like all great men of letters or geniuses, was a poor business man and an absolute failure as an administrator of the practical things in every-day life. To him life seemed to be a medium for the realization of certain aims and the promotion of the social welfare, and not an occasion for the talking of shop, the gratification of petty personal desires and the amassing of wealth, etc.

From the beginning of his exile in London and practically up to his death Marx and his family bore a burden of poverty far heavier and more unbearable than the one carried by the average proletarian family in those days. There were days in the Marx household when the stove was cold, the frost biting, the pantry empty and hunger upon the bill of fare; when the impatient landlord stormed and threatened, and the children's starved faces and beseeching glances seemed to accusingly form themselves into a veritable indictment against their father. These ungratifying, yes, most miserable of miserable conditions pained Marx severely. Not because he feared, or cared for material sufferings; no, Marx passed such vicissitudes of every-day life over with truly noble unconcern. What, however, affected and pained him so deeply was to see his wife, this faithful companion