Friedrich Engels was the son of a rich manufacturer in the Rhineland. His father owned a cotton mill near Manchester, to which, in 1842, Engels had been sent to study English business conditions. He was already an eager critic of social conditions, and how carefully he observed the life about him, his Condition of the Work ing Classes in England in 1844, which he published in 1845, bears Witness. A sympathizer with the Chartist Movement, and a contributor to Owen's New Moral il/vorld, he was exactly in the frame of mind to be recep tive to Marx's ideas. And his personal qualities admirably fitted him to be the complement of Marx. Thoroughly loyal, without an atom of personal ambition, generous, and self — effacing, practical and energetic, he brought to Marx all the necessary characteristics of a Pidas Aclzates. His unstinting literary assistance hardly less than his constant financial aid were the materials which determined Marx's future career. It is, indeed, almost impossible to disentangle the labours of the two; Clearly enough, it was to Engels that Marx owed both his knowledge of English blue-books as a source of economic theory, and his introduction to the work of the English socialist school. Without Engels, too, it would have been difficult for Marx to undertake the research to which the first volume of the Capital bears witness and the posthumous publication of the two latter volumes was the tribute that Engels paid to the memory of his master. That Marx would have been an important figure without Engels is clear enough; but the aid ren dered bythe latter made all the difference between the comparative calm of London and the restless wanderings of which hapless exiles like Bakunin were the miserable victims.
