we cannot help thinking that what Hyndman says in his memoirs his wife told him of Mrs. Marx having said about Engels must have been due to some misapprehension on Mrs. Hyndman's part. It surely speaks volumes for the characters of both men, that during the stress and storm of their forty years' friendship, through success and disappointment, and they had many, no shadow of discord came between them, never did their friendship flag except on the one occasion mentioned above, which was due to a misunderstanding.
Already in 1845, when Engels heard that Marx had been expelled from Paris, he at once opened up a subscription for him "in order," he wrote, "that the extra cost occasioned thereby should be shared by all of us communistically." And later he says: "As I do not know whether this (the money collected) will suffice for your settling down in Brussels, it goes without saying that my honorarium for my first English thing (Thе Condition of the Working Classes in England), which I hope very soon to get at least in part, and which for the moment I can do without, will be placed, with the greatest pleasure, entirely at your disposal. The hounds shall not at least have the pleasure of causing you pecuniary embarrassment through their infamy." And, as we have seen above, he was ever afterwards always ready to help Marx in every way.
During the last illness of Marx's wife, and later that of his daughter Jenny, Engels was not only all sympathy in words, but did all he could practically to mitigate their suffering. When Marx had gone to Paris with his wife on her last visit to her daughters, he writes to Marx telling him to let him know if he needs anything—not to hesitate in the least about naming whatever sum of money he may need. "Your wife must be denied nothing. Whatever she wants, or whatever any of you think may cause her pleasure, that she must have," he writes—July 29, 1881.
Lessuer bears testimony to the fact that Engels was always ready to help anyone who came to him in need. Perhaps, however, no better testimony to his generosity can be adduced than the truly remarkable way in which both during Marx's lifetime and after his death Engels always belittled his own share of their joint work, and gave Marx credit for all that was best and most profound in it. The quotations given above already prove this. At other times he said: "Marx stood higher, saw farther, observed more, and comprehended more rapidly than any of us." He maintained that what he (Engels) had discovered Marx would in any case have discovered without him.
But, after all, this does not detract in the least from his own merit, and as Mehring well says: "History has to do with what was, not with what might have been." If Marx was the greater genius, Engels undoubtedly runs him a very close second, and is almost absurdly modest about it.
But Engels always was very modest. Thus, regarding the congratulations on his seventieth birthday, he writes: "I wish it were all over. I
