Page:Zelda Kahan - The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels (1920).pdf/40

36 "When a man is past seventy, his brain's fibres of association work with a certain disagreeable slowness. He does not overcome interruptions of difficult theoretical problems as easily and quickly as formerly. Thus it came about that the work of one winter, if it was not completed, had to be largely done over the following winter.

"And this took place particularly in the case of the most difficult section—the fifth.

"The reader will observe by the following statements that the work of editing the third was essentially different from that of the second volume. Nothing was available for the third volume but a first draft, and it was very incomplete.

"The beginnings of the various sections were, as a rule, pretty carefully elaborated, or even polished as to style. But the farther one proceeded, the more sketchy and incomplete was the analysis, the more excursions it contained into side issues whose proper place in the argument was left for later decision, the longer and more complex became the sentences in which the rising thoughts were deposited as they came. In several places, the handwriting and the treatment of the matter clearly revealed the approach and gradual progress of those attacks of ill-health, due to overwork, which at first rendered original work more and more difficult for the author, and finally compelled him from time to time to stop work altogether. And no wonder. Between 1863 and 1867, Marx had not only completed the first draft of the last two volumes of Capital, and made the first volume ready for the printer, but had also mastered the enormous work connected with the foundation and expansion of the International Working-men's Association. The result was the appearance of the first symptoms of that ill-health which is to blame for the fact that Marx did not himself put the finishing touches to the second and third volumes."

In the summer of 1884 Engels published his best-known book—The Origin of the Family, of Private Property and the State, and this is the last of his works with which we shall deal in any detail here.

With his characteristic modesty he opens his preface to the first edition thus:—"The following chapters are in a certain sense executing a bequest. It was no less a man than Karl Marx who had reserved to himself the privilege of displaying the results of Morgan's investigations in connection with his own materialistic conception of history—which I might call ours within certain limits. He wished thus to elucidate the full meaning of this conception. For in America, Morgan had, in a manner, discovered anew the materialistic conception of history originated by Marx forty years ago. In comparing barbarism and civilisation he had arrived in the main at the same results as Marx. And just as Capital was zealously plagiarised and persistently passed over in silence by professional economists in Germany, so Morgan's