The truth, not fully recognized even by those anxious to do good to women, is that she, like the labour classes, is in an oppressed condition; that her position, like theirs, is one of merciless degradation. Women are the creatures of an organized tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers.

Both the oppressed classes, women and the immediate producers, must understand that their emancipation will come from themselves. Women will find allies in the better sort of men, as the labourers are finding allies among the philosophers, artists, and poets. But the one has nothing to hope from man as a whole, and the other has nothing to hope from the middle class as a whole.

Another of our helpers at headquarters (during the London Docker's Strike) was Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor, the tragic wife of Edward Aveling. Brilliant, devoted and beautiful, she was Marx's youngest daughter, and a Londoner by birth. At the time of our strike, she was only thirty years old. She lived with Aveling under very unhappy conditions, which did not break her spirit, or cause her to waver in her devotion to the working-class cause. She was active in support of the efforts we were making to organize unskilled labour in the East End of London. She was destined, poor girl, within a few years to put an end to her unhappiness by taking her own life.

Not many of us knew, at the time, about the wretchedness of her relations with Aveling. He was a man of exceptionally brilliant intellect, a scholar, and a scientist, who taught chemistry, physiology and comparative anatomy at University lecturer. He had an Irishman's charm, but he was wayward, unstable, with darker traits in his character which spelt misery and emotional strain for the woman associated with him.

Eleanor Marx was a woman of heavy build, very dark, widely read and widely travelled, and it was a privilege to talk with her about her distinguished father and his famous friends, Engels, Bebel, and others. Of her husband, Dr. Edward Aveling, little need be said. He was a man of great capacity, a magnificent speaker with a wonderful voice, but his sense of responsibility towards others, or to whatever cause he elected to serve, was quite undeveloped. It was through my acquaintance with Dr. Aveling that I first realised that a fine education and a powerful mind did not of necessity make a fine man.

Because of my Guggenheim project, I made several efforts to arrange a meeting with Edouard Bernstein, the famous revisionist of Marx, then living in retirement. His figure and outlook, in the perspective of the fifty years after Marx's death, had grown enormously. I was put off several times, and when I finally met him, I realized why. He was suffering from advanced arteriosclerosis and was attended by a nurse. He seemed at first reluctant to talk about his reminiscences of Marx, but at the outset of our talk, to my chagrin, was eager to describe his first day at school, about which he had very vivid memories. I kept reverting to various episodes of Marx's life and to some of Marx's literary remains, which Engels had entrusted to Bernstein. His manner was benign and friendly. Only twice did he lose his composure and burst out with a stormy lucidity. The first time was when I mentioned Edward Aveling with whom Eleanor Marx, Marx's youngest daughter, had been enamored, and who had been the cause of her suicide. Bernstein rose from his chair with flushed face and agitated tone and voice and denounced him as an "arch scoundrel". I did not, however, get a very coherent account of Aveling's infamy. The second time was when I mentioned in passing that I had been invited to pursue my studies on the period from Hegel to Marx at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow by its director, David Ryazanov. When he heard Ryazanov's name, he fumed and charged him with being a liar and a thief, who had stolen materials from the Social Democratic Party archives. Throughout the hour or so when I kept bringing up the name of Lenin in hopes of initiating some discussion of Lenin's Marxism, he made disparaging references to "the Bolsheviks," but my most significant memory of the conversation was his reference to himself, as if he suspected this American pilgrim of an excess of Marxist piety, as a "methodological reactionary." For him socialism was a child of the Enlightenment. "I am still an eighteenth-century rationalist," he said, "and not at all ashamed of it. I believe that in essentials their approach was both valid and fruitful." Was this the method or approach of Marx? I inquired. His answer was not altogether clear, but its drift was that it was a continuation with important historical differences. It was somewhere at this point, as I recall, that he lowered his voice and in a confidential whisper, as if afraid of being overheard, leaned toward me and observed: "The Bolsheviks are not altogether unjustified in claiming Marx as their own. Marx, you know, had a strong Bolshevik streak in him." The nurse who had been silently present all the time signaled me that the interview was over.