The modern socialist says, No land is my fatherland, for in none am I a son. He believes himself to be equally neglected in all, and that is precisely the severest strain that can try the patriotic sentiment. The proletarian is taught that in every country he is a slave, and that patriotism and religion only reconcile him to remaining so. Moreover, as Rodbertus has remarked, the social question itself is, in a sense, international because it is social. CHAPTER IV. KARL MARX. In opening the present chapter in the previous edition of this book, I said it was not a little remarkable that the works of Karl Marx, which had then excited considerable commotion in other European countries, were still absolutely unknown in England, though England was the country where they were written, and to whose circumstances they were, in their author's judgment, pre-eminently applicable. His principal work, "Das Kapital," is a criticism of modern industrial development as explained by English economists and exemplified in English society. It shows a rare knowledge of English economic literature, even of the most obscure writers; it goes very fully into the conditions of English labour as described in our parliamentary reports; and out of four hundred odd books it quotes, more than three hundred are English books. Its illustrations are drawn from English industrial life, and its very money allusions are stated in terms of English coin. Its chief doctrine, moreover, was an old English doctrine, familiar among the disciples of Owen; and to crown all, if the author's belief was true, England was the country ripest for its reception, for the socialist revolution, he thought, would inevitably come when the working class sunk into the condition of a proletariat, and the working class of England had been a proletariat for many years already. Yet Marx's work was not at that time (1884) translated into English, though it had been into most other European languages, and had enjoyed a very large sale even in Russia, to whose circumstances it had admittedly very little adaptation. An English translation appeared at length, however, in 1887, twenty years after the publication of the original, and a considerable edition was disposed of within a year, though the price was high. We have therefore grown more familiar of late with the name and importance of Karl Marx.