"In Breslau a churchyard—a dead man in grave:
There slumbers the one who to us the sword gave."
But here again we are not satisfied with the purely personal element; we must rather seek after the real grounds for the explanation of the fact.
To me it seems that the triumph of the German type in the international movement, as it was begun through Lassalle, lies essentially in the circumstance that Lassalle's agitation, and then the later German movement, is filled by the spirit of that man who was called to formulate the theories which should bring to a sharp point all the general objects of proletarian effort. You know that I mean Karl Marx.
The name of this man expresses all the centripetal force which the modern social movement contains. From him comes all that which tends to remove national peculiarities and to make an international movement. "Marxism" is the tendency to make the social movement international, to unify it. But of this we must not here speak; only of its peculiar features. The one great social movement runs first into separate streams of national effort; later these unite again. There is throughout a tendency to return to unity. But the movement develops itself in national lines and is determined by contingencies which make history. The general law of these incidental circumstances I have tried to show to you to-day.
And now at last let us pass to the theorist of the social movement, Karl Marx.