A SOCIALIST EDITOR.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 23, 28 January 1911, Page 12

A SOCIALIST EDITOR.

* Like the great Socialistic leader, Ferdinand Lassalle, Maximilian Harden was the son of a Jewish merchant* Records Edward Goldbeck ih the New York Evening Post. The most striking feature of the boy was his independence. His temperament was at the same time fiery and brooding. At the gym nasium he out-distanced all his comrades and showed wonderful ability for everything except mathematics, but when he was twelve years old he ran away from his fathers house, joined a troupe of wandering actors, and travelled with them through the small towns of nbrther Germany. He was found and brought back to his parents, but his thirst for a free and romantic life was not quenched by this experience, and some years later he left college and made himself ah actor. He followed this calling for seven years, and even at the present time his memory retains not only the parts he played himself, but the whole comedies and dramas he studied in this period of his life. He takes pleasure in reciting and playing scenes for his intimate friends' ih a half earnest, half irohical vein. He has an especial gift ftr caricature, anu if he .ver& not the greatest journalist of Germany, and, one nitty say without exaggeration, of Europe, he could surely make a very good living in the vaudeville. WEITING THAT NEVEB BORES. Sooner or later a man of suuh penetrating intellectuality was bound to discover that his greatest future lay outside oi tho theatre. He gave up actihg and tried to write. He did not feel then that writing was his real vocation; he ohfy wrote to make a little money, a» he did not posses* any fortune of hi* own. But almost immediately he- made a hit. His style was so strong, so exciting, that, as a woman once said to mo, it tbld on the reader, as it wow, physically. His ideas were so original that he surprised you, nurt you, perhaps, but never bored you. He behaved like an outsider, scoffed at the political parties or preached to them and attacked with a real fury tho «dols of the day. In his weekly, Die Zukunft, Harden nas_ created a perfectly independent periodical, as he is at the same tun» editor and proprietor. It brings him an income of £40,000 a year— which is «normous, according to German notions, liis success is thtt mvr* fcstunishmt as, he never spared anybody, and possesses the gentle are of making enemies in the nighsfc degree. His recipe was very simple. He gave way to his subjectivity without any worldly consideration, without, fear, ai:d without forbearance-. So everybody reads hi* article, but very few like the author. His enemies accuse him of having no principle and of being too changeable. It may be that he is changeable; but he is always himself. On my writing-desk smuds his photo, graph, upon which he has written the words : "II croit tout cc qu'il dit."-