The youth in question was Karl Marx, whose later history exhibits a wide divergence from the exclusively literary career prophesied by his boyhood scholastic interests. The classmate who is authority for this incident continued in Marx’s company the _Gymnasium_ studies; he then performed his one year minimum of military service, and having secured some business experience sailed away as an immigrant to the new world, settling on a Wisconsin farm. In the course of a long life he often reverted to the story of Goethe, whose works, as well as those of Schiller and Lessing, made a part of his home library. These great names never failed to kindle his pride in the intellectual achievements of the German people, whose governments at the time of his emigration in 1841 seemed to him a compound of despotism and inefficiency.[39] Doubtless there were Germans of the immigration to Wisconsin who knew not Goethe, or if in a hazy way they did know who he was, had no intellectual right to judge his merits. But the more intelligent were sure to possess some knowledge of the writings of their greatest poet and of lesser men who still were great in the world’s estimation. Hence it was that Germans who at that period went to the new world, while acknowledging by their flight the political, economic, and social obstacles to a successful life in Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Westphalia, or Luxemburg, were always able to maintain a self-respecting attitude when confronted with the pretensions of those Americans who were unsympathetic, jingoistic, or boastful. German immigrants might grant much to superior cleverness, to the stupendous achievements of a liberty loving race, domiciled in a peaceful continent and dowered with free lands and boundless opportunity; but they remembered that _William Tell_ and _Faust_ and _The Laocoön_ were written by Germans.