In dealing with history we must accept facts and men as we find them. The facts are as they are; and the men of history are not ideal men. Like other men Marx had to work under human limitations. The great task of his life was to rouse the proletariat of the world to a sense of its position, its mission, and destiny, to discover the scientific conditions under which a new era in the evolution of the human race could be inaugurated and carried on by the working classes of all lands. It was a mixed task in which science and practice were combined, and in which the purely scientific study of history naturally suffered in the partnership with a very strenuous revolutionary practice. We need not say that it was not the fault of Marx that he adopted the revolutionary career. He was born at a time and in a country where men of independence and originality of character of necessity became revolutionists. In face of the European reaction Marx never made any concession or compromise. He never bowed himself in the house of Rimmon. Seldom in the history of human thought has there been a man who travelled right ahead in so straightforward a path, however formidable the opposition and however apparently hopeless surrounding circumstances might be. Public opinion had no weight with him; neither idle sentiment nor amiable weaknesses found any place in his strongly-marked individuality. In view of such a career spent in the unflinching service of what he regarded to be truth, and in the greatest of human causes, it would be mean and disgraceful not to speak of Marx in terms of profound respect. His sincerity, his courage, his self-abnegation, his devotion to his great work through long years of privation and obloquy, were heroic. If he had followed the broad and well-beaten highway of self-interest, Marx, with his exceptional endowments both for thought and action, might easily have risen to a foremost place in the Prussian State. He disdained the flesh-pots of despotism and obscurantism so much sought after by the average sensual man, and spent forty hard and laborious years almost wholly in exile as the scientific champion of the proletariat. Many men are glad to live an hour of glorious life. Few are strong and brave enough to live the life heroic for forty years with the resolution, the courage, and consistency of Karl Marx.