The same may be said, of course, of the growth of Socialism everywhere during the same period.

But in Germany it has for a generation past, or even more, occupied an exceptional position, alike as regards the rapidity of its increase, its direct influence on the masses, and its party organization.

Modern Socialism, as a party doctrine, is, moreover, a product of the best period of nineteenth-century German thought and literature.

Its three great theoretical protagonists, Marx, Engels, and their younger contemporary, Lassalle, all issued from the great Hegelian movement of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Their propagandist activity, literary and otherwise, was in the German language.