Treves, therefore, has a right to be termed imperial, and it was the birthplace of one whose sway over the minds of men has been both imperial and imperious.

Karl Marx was one of those whose intellectual achievements were so great as to dwarf his individuality and his private life.  What he taught with almost terrific vigor made his very presence in the Continental monarchies a source of eminent danger.  He was driven from country to country.  Kings and emperors were leagued together against him.  Soldiers were called forth, and blood was shed because of him.  But, little by little, his teaching seems to have leavened the thought of the whole civilized world, so that to-day thousands who barely know his name are deeply affected by his ideas, and believe that the state should control and manage everything for the good of all.

Marx seems to have inherited little from either of his parents.  His father, Heinrich Marx, was a provincial Jewish lawyer who had adopted Christianity, probably because it was expedient, and because it enabled him to hold local offices and gain some social consequence.  He had changed his name from Mordecai to Marx.

The elder Marx was very shrewd and tactful, and achieved a fair position among the professional men and small officials in the city of Treves.  He had seen the horrors of the French Revolution, and was philosopher enough to understand the meaning of that mighty upheaval, and of the Napoleonic era which followed.

Napoleon, indeed, had done much to relieve his race from petty oppression.  France made the Jews in every respect the equals of the Gentiles.  One of its ablest marshals—­Massena—­was a Jew, and therefore, when the imperial eagle was at the zenith of its flight, the Jews in every city and town of Europe were enthusiastic admirers of Napoleon, some even calling him the Messiah.

Karl Marx’s mother, it is certain, endowed him with none of his gifts.  She was a Netherlandish Jewess of the strictly domestic and conservative type, fond of her children and her home, and detesting any talk that looked to revolutionary ideas or to a change in the social order.  She became a Christian with her husband, but the word meant little to her.  It was sufficient that she believed in God; and for this she was teased by some of her skeptical friends.  Replying to them, she uttered the only epigram that has ever been ascribed to her.

“Yes,” she said, “I believe in God, not for God’s sake, but for my own.”

She was so little affected by change of scene that to the day of her death she never mastered German, but spoke almost wholly in her native Dutch.  Had we time, we might dwell upon the unhappy paradox of her life.  In her son Karl she found an especial joy, as did her husband.  Had the father lived beyond Karl’s early youth, he would doubtless have been greatly pained by the radicalism of his gifted son, as well as by his personal privations.  But the mother lived until 1863, while Karl was everywhere stirring the fires of revolution, driven from land to land, both feared and persecuted, and often half famished.  As Mr. Spargo says: