If, again, they had been told that Ferdinand Lassalle had joined in the great movement initiated by Karl Marx, it is absolutely certain that neither the Englishman nor the American could have given you the slightest notion as to who these individuals were. Thrones might be tottering all over Europe; the red flag might wave in a score of cities--what would all this signify, so long as Britannia ruled the waves, while Columbia's feathered emblem shrieked defiance three thousand miles away? And yet few more momentous events have happened in a century than the union which led one man to give his eloquence to the social cause, and the other to suffer for that cause until his death. Marx had the higher thought, but his disciple Lassalle had the more attractive way of presenting it. It is odd that Marx, today, should lie in a squalid cemetery, while the whole western world echoes with his praises, and that Lassalle--brilliant, clear-sighted, and remarkable for his penetrating genius--should have lived in luxury, but should now know nothing but oblivion, even among those who shouted at his eloquence and ran beside him in the glory of his triumph. Ferdinand Lassalle was a native of Breslau, the son of a wealthy Jewish silk-merchant. Heymann Lassal--for thus the father spelled his name--stroked his hands at young Ferdinand's cleverness, but he meant it to be a commercial cleverness. He gave the boy a thorough education at the University of Breslau, and later at Berlin. He was an affectionate parent, and at the same time tyrannical to a degree. It was the old story where the father wishes to direct every step that his son takes, and where the son, bursting out into youthful manhood, feels that he has the right to freedom. The father thinks how he has toiled for the son; the son thinks that if this toil were given for love, it should not be turned into a fetter and restraint. Young Lassalle, instead of becoming a clever silk-merchant, insisted on a university career, where he studied earnestly, and was admitted to the most cultured circles. Though his birth was Jewish, he encountered little prejudice against his race. Napoleon had changed the old anti-Semitic feeling of fifty years before to a liberalism that was just beginning to be strongly felt in Germany, as it had already been in France. This was true in general, but especially true of Lassalle, whose features were not of a Semitic type, who made friends with every one, and who was a favorite in many salons. His portraits make him seem a high-bred and high-spirited Prussian, with an intellectual and clean-cut forehead; a face that has a sense of humor, and yet one capable of swift and cogent thought.