THE ORIGINS OF MARX.—It is to be hoped that the reputation of Marx will not long survive the war unimpaired. I can scarcely think that the German Socialists will be so proud of their Marxism in the future as they have been in the past, since it will have clearly betrayed them into one of the most shameful moral surrenders in all history. It is dangerous for a man’s writings to be regarded as the “Bible” even of Socialists; and when, in addition, the Marxian Bible, unlike the other, aims at and, in a sense, achieves, logical consistency, the peril of it is greater upon minds lacking the inestimable virtue of common sense. Marx was not himself a slave of his own inspiration; he was anything but a Marxian in the sense in which his followers are Marxian. He had, indeed, a very sharp word for certain of the disciples whose breed, unfortunately, has not been extinguished by it. “Amateur anarchists,” he called them, who “make up by rabid declarations and bloodthirsty rampings for the utter insignificance of their political existence.” Groups of his disciples, answering perfectly to this description, are to be found to-day in English as well as in other Labour circles. In between their rampings they reveal their political insignificance by inquiring of each other such elementary facts about literature and history as schoolboys should be ashamed to have forgotten. And the surprising thing is that even these open confessions induce no reaction upon their conviction that they understand Marx.