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Washington Law Review

Abstract

I seriously propose for your consideration that not Charles Darwin, not Abraham Lincoln, not Bismarck, have so profoundly influenced the life of the world today as has the German writer and Socialist organizer, Karl Marx. The god of Soviet Russia is Karl Marx. And Vladimir Ilyitch Ulianoff—Lenin—is his Messiah. The Bible of the working classes of Europe-yes, of Socialist working men around the world, is the book which Karl Marx first published in 1867—"Das Capital," in which his economic social theories are advanced with tremendous power, although with an opacity of expression that obstructed their meaning from him who reads them casually. I want to say something'to you about this man whose thinking is so alien to our own, and yet who is so deeply affecting the life of a large number of the human race today. Consider that a portrait of Karl Marx hangs on the wall of every village assembly room in Russia. Lenin devoted himself not only to expounding the doctrine of Karl Marx, or forcing it upon Russia, but of endeavoring to bring all the Russian peoples to regard Karl Marx as their genius, as their guide, philosopher and friend. Soviet Russia is the expression, as Lenin conceived it, of the teachings of Karl Marx. When one hundred sixty millions of people are committed by their legal heads, the Communist Party of Russia, to set a program, it is well for us to try to understand it, and when you understand that a part and parcel of that teaching is of necessity of a continuous and unremitting propaganda to express that doctrine around the world, you are given cause for thought.

First Page

145

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