So much is said merely by way of explanation, first, that the manner of acquiring private and corporate property and making it social property is not to be decided in advance, and secondly, that there are historic precedents for confiscation. On the other hand, there is no good reason why compensation should not be paid for such properties. You start! You have been more shocked than if I had said we should seize the properties and cut the throats of the proprietors! Be assured: I am not forgetting my promise to be frank with you, nor am I expressing my personal opinion merely when I say that there is nothing in the theory of modern Socialism which precludes the possibility of compensation. There is no Socialist of repute and authority in the world, so far as my knowledge goes, who makes a contrary claim. I should regard it as unworthy to lay down as the Socialist position views which were my own, and which were not shared by the great body of Socialist thinkers throughout the world. It is not less nor more than the truth that all the leading Socialists of the world agree that compensation could be paid without doing violence to a single Socialist principle, and most of them favor it.[200] Once more I shall appeal to the authority of Marx. Engels wrote in 1894: "We do not at all consider the indemnification of the proprietors as an impossibility, whatever may be the circumstances. How many times has not Karl Marx expressed to me the opinion that if we could buy up the whole crowd it would really be the cheapest way of relieving ourselves of them."[201] Not only Marx, then, in the most intimate of his discussions with Engels, his bosom friend, but Engels himself, in almost his last days, refused to admit the impossibility of paying indemnity for properties socialized, "_whatever may be the circumstances_."