them in a calm and sober fashion, that he led up from them to further deductions of still greater interest connected with them.  The individual articles were short, and never contained anything superfluous, in addition to which they were so clearly written, that they made an instructive and convincing appeal to the most uneducated mind.  By always going to the root of things, instead of indulging in circumlocutions which, in politics, have caused such great confusion in the minds of the uneducated masses, he soon had a large circle of readers, both among cultivated and uncultivated people.  The only drawback was that the price of the little weekly paper was too small to yield him a corresponding profit.  Moreover, it was necessary to warn him that if the reactionary party should ever come into power again, it could never possibly forgive him for this newspaper.  His younger brother, Edward, who was paying a visit at the time in Dresden, declared himself willing to accept a post as piano-teacher in England, which, though most uncongenial to him, would be lucrative and place him in a position to help Rockel’s family, if, as seemed probable, he met his reward in prison or on the gallows.  Owing to his connection with various societies, his time was so much taken up that my intercourse with him was limited to walks, which became more and more rare.  On these occasions I often got lost in the most wildly speculative and profound discussions, while this wonderfully exciteable man always remained calmly reflective and clear-headed.  First and foremost, he had planned a drastic social reform of the middle classes—­as at present constituted—­by aiming at a complete alteration of the basis of their condition.  He constructed a totally new moral order of things, founded on the teaching of Proudhon and other socialists regarding the annihilation of the power of capital, by immediately productive labour, dispensing with the middleman.  Little by little he converted me, by most seductive arguments, to his own views, to such an extent that I began to rebuild my hopes for the realisation of my ideal in art upon them.  Thus there were two questions which concerned me very nearly:  he wished to abolish matrimony, in the usual acceptation of the word, altogether.  I thereupon asked him what he thought the result would be of promiscuous intercourse with women of a doubtful character.  With amiable indignation he gave me to understand that we could have no idea about the purity of morals in general, and of the relations of the sexes in particular, so long as we were unable to free people completely from the yoke of the trades, guilds, and similar coercive institutions.  He asked me to consider what the only motive would be which would induce a woman to surrender herself to a man, when not only the considerations of money, fortune, position, and family prejudices, but also the various influences necessarily arising from these, had disappeared.  When I, in my turn, asked him whence he would obtain persons of great