"Yesterday, at half-past two in the afternoon, the best time for
visiting him, I went down to see him; everybody was in tears; it
looked as if the end had come. I made inquiries, trying to get
at the truth of the matter and to offer consolation. There had
been a slight haemorrhage, but a sudden collapse had supervened.
Our good old Lena, who had tended him better than any mother
does her child, went up, came down. He was half asleep, she
said; I could go up. As we went in, he lay there, sleeping,
never to wake again. Pulse and breathing had ceased. In those
two minutes he had gone painlessly and peacefully to sleep....
Mankind is less by a head, and indeed by the most important head
it had to-day. The working-class movement will pursue its
course, but its central point, to which French, Russians,
Americans, and Germans turned of their own accord in decisive
moments, always to receive that clear, unambiguous counsel which
genius and perfect mastery alone can give--is gone."
On Saturday, March 17, he was buried in the Highgate Cemetery, London.
Among those who spoke at the graveside were Friedrich Engels and
Wilhelm Liebknecht. The former gave a brief account of his
revolutionary struggles, in which he said:
"Just as Darwin discovered the law of the evolution of organic
nature, so Marx discovered the evolutionary law of human
history--the simple fact, hitherto hidden under ideological
overgrowths, that above all things men must eat, drink, dress,
and find shelter before they can give themselves to politics,
science, art, religion, or anything else, and that therefore the
production of the material necessaries of life and the
corresponding stage of economic evolution of a people or a
period provides the foundation upon which the national
institutions, legal systems, art, and even religious ideas of
the people in question have been built, and upon which,
therefore, their explanation must be based, a procedure the
reverse of that which has hitherto been adopted. Marx discovered
also the special law of motion for the modern capitalist mode of
production and for the middle-class society which it begets.
With the discovery of surplus value light was at once thrown
upon a subject, all the earlier investigations of which, whether
by middle-class economists or by Socialist critics, had been
gropings in the dark...."
After him spoke Liebknecht, who had hastened from Germany to pay a
last tribute to his friend and master:
"The dead one, whose loss we mourn, was great in his love and in
his hate. His hate sprang from his love. He had a great heart,
as he had a great intellect. He has raised social democracy from
a sect, from a school, to a party, which now already fights
unconquered, and in the end will win the victory."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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