Liebknecht, unlike some of the other social democrats, is, as generally admitted, personally an honorable man. Nothing can be said against his private life. He differed from Marx, Lassalle, and Von Schweitzer in family and fortune. He was born poor, and has always remained so. While in party matters Liebknecht is unscrupulous as to means, he would sacrifice no principle for the sake of personal gain or advancement. If he had been less conscientious his life might have been a prosperous one. I have it directly from a friend, who associated with him considerably in Leipsic, that Bismarck offered him an excellent position as editor of the _Kreuzzeitung_, which I have already mentioned as the leading organ of the conservatives. Liebknecht declined promptly, and without hesitation, what was intended as a bribe. He is satisfied with the merest necessities of life, so long as he can serve his cause. Mehring, who is far from being a social democrat, says that in this respect he is irreproachable. “No one can accuse him of improper motives in the lower sense of the term.” It is only when the cause of the social democrats is concerned that he shows himself unscrupulous, exciting envy and discontent, and arousing class against class. His ideas have taken such hold of him that he cannot see the deeds of opponents in their true light. He ascribes the worst of motives to what government does with the best intention. Although he must be called a demagogue, Liebknecht is a highly educated man. He comes of what the Germans call a _Beamtenfamilie_—_i.e._, of a family whose members have for a long time devoted themselves to the civil service. This implies, at least, education and social respectability. Liebknecht was only sixteen years of age when he graduated from a German gymnasium—what we would call a college—but he had already decided that a career as a civil-service officer placed one in a position of such dependence that it was unworthy of a freeman. At the university he took no regular professional course, as he despised bread-and-butter studies, but devoted himself to various branches of science according to his inclination, or as he fancied they might contribute to the free development of his mind. At twenty he thought he had freed himself from bondage to the antiquated institutions of a corrupt world.