There is no doubt that, according to the common idea, Marx and Engels, who must always be named with him, appear in a light essentially different from that which I have attempted to show to you. In general these men have been looked upon, not only as different from what I have stated, but as in a bad sense the very opposite of social realists; namely, as the father and the guardian of the worst kind of revolutionary thought. And who would not apparently be justified in this belief, reading the writings of both these men? He reads of clanking chains which must be broken, of revolutions towards which man tends, of bloody battle and death and assassination. How does the matter really lie? Marx himself once said, _Moi je ne suis pas Marxiste_, but he gave to these words a meaning different from the ordinary one, as I also do when I say that Marx and Engels have not always shown themselves consistent Marxists either in theory or in practice. Doubtless there are inconsistencies in theory, contradictions of the fundamental thoughts, discrepancies which can have only one source--that is, an overwhelming revolutionary passion which obscures a vision otherwise so clear. For example, I think of their unreasonable belief in what they call the "fall" of humanity through the introduction of the principle of private property, from which as they say history, and as well the forces of history, take their start; the astonished hearer asks himself, What impelled man to the introduction of this principle? I think, also, of the hypothesis of a strifeless condition of humanity after the introduction of socialism--and the like. Here, and throughout, the old dreams of a Paradise lost and regained, of a happy condition of humanity originally, come as a disturbing element into their new world of thought.