Page:Zelda Kahan - The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels (1920).pdf/13

of Friedrich Engels communism. Already in this small sketch he showed that he had grasped what was best, what was most revolutionary in the Hegelian philosophy, and was using it as the master key for unravelling the mysteries of historic and economic development. In the same journal he published an interesting criticism of Carlyle's Past and Present, which he characterised as the only book in the English literature of the year 1843 that was worth reading.

Considering that he was then only twenty-two years old, that he himself was suffering from none of the disabilities of the workers' life, that he himself belonged by family, education, and profession to the bourgeoisie, it is not without interest to note the judgment he passes on the English classes and parties of the time.

After describing in vigorous language the spiritual emptiness of the English aristocracy and bourgeoisie, he characterises the educated Englishman, according to whom the English national character has generally been judged on the Continent, as the "most abject slave under the sun," and then continues: "Only the section of the English nation hitherto unknown on the Continent, only the workers, the pariahs of England, the poor, are really respectable in spite of all their rawness and all their demoralisation. It is they who will save England, they still present educational material. They have no education, but neither have they narrow prejudices. They still possess power for great national work, they still have a future before them." Of the two parties into which the educated classes were split, Engels finds the Tories, bad as they are, less objectionable than the Whigs, who looked upon everything in industry, which had given them power and wealth, as quite faultless, and regarded its extension as the only aim of all legislation.

It is remarkable how Marx and Engels—quite independently, the one basing himself on a study of the French Revolution and on philosophy, the other, on the study of English industrial conditions—came practically to the same conclusions regarding the nature of bourgeois society. The materialist conception of history was already colouring both their writings, although at that time, perhaps, in a more finished form in Marx than in Engels.

Their writings in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher led to an exchange of correspondence between them, and in September, 1844, on his way back to Germany, Engels went to Paris for a few days to visit Marx. So complete was their agreement in their outlook upon philosophic and economic questions that they at once began a work in common—The Holy Family: or, a Review of the Critical Critique Against Bruno Bauer and his Followers.

It was published in 1845, and its aim was, according to the authors, to make plain to the larger public the illusions of speculative philosophy.