VII. The Internationale

Role of the Jews in Germany—German Social Democracy—Lassalle—Karl Marx—Engels—Russian Anarchy—Michel Bakunin—"The Working-men's Association"—Intrigues of Marx—The "Alliance of Social Democracy"—Bakunin and the "German Jew Company."

In order to follow the new course on which the World Revolution now entered it is necessary to understand something of the events that had taken place in Germany during the memorable year of 1848.

We have already seen how the plan of a United Germany, with Prussia at its head, originating with Frederick the Great, had been carried on not only by his successor Frederick William II. but by the Illuminati, the Tugendbund, and the Masonic Lodges. Under Frederick William III., Master of the Grand Lodge of Prussia, a further pact was concluded between Prussia and Freemasonry.

The lodges judged that Prussia was of all the States of Europe the one most capable of carrying out their work, and they made it the pivot of their political action . . . the idea of a union under their domination never ceased to be the aim of all the lodges.

But it seems that in Frederick William IV. they encountered a rebel. Without this hypothesis the agitation that took place in Berlin on the 18th of March 1848 is incomprehensible. Why should the King of Prussia have become the object of a hostile demonstration led to the cry of a "United Germany" in which Prussia was to be supreme? Why should he have rejected as "a crown of shame" (Schandkrone) the Imperial diadem subsequently offered him by the National Assembly of Frankfurt and have pressed the claims of Austria to supremacy? May not the explanation be that Frederick William IV. had broken away from the traditions of the Hohenzollerns in refusing to ally himself with the subversive forces of which his predecessors had made such good use abroad, and that in preferring the claim of Austrian to Prussian supremacy his motive was reluctance to make himself the tool of the masons and to subscribe to their formula, as expressed by Mazzini: "Delenda est Austria"?

The crown of shame which he declined to wear when offered to him by the Frankfurt Assembly under the President von Gagern, Freemason and Member of the Burschenschaft, was the Masonic crown worn by Frederick the Great and his two successors, offered by the Freemasons of France to the Duke of Brunswick and placed on the head of William I. in 1871.

Role of Jews in German Unification

But there was yet another consideration that may well have weighed with Frederick William IV. Freemasonry was not the only subversive force at work in Germany. Behind Freemasonry, behind even the secret societies that made of Freemasons their adepts, another power was making itself felt, a power that ever since the Congress of Wilhelmsbad in 1782 had been slowly gaining ground—the power of the Jews.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century the part played by the Jews in the revolutionary movement is more or less obscure. We have seen their mole-like working below ground during the first French Revolution, suspected by Prudhomme, we have seen them insinuating themselves into Masonic Lodges and secret societies, we have seen rich Jews financing the Haute Vente Romaine, and needy members of the tribe acting as agents of Nubius, but at the same time we have watched the building up of Capitalism by Jewish hands, and Jews in Russia supporting the authority of the Czar. How are we to explain this double ro1e of the Jews throughout the social revolution? The common theory that as victims of oppression they embraced with fervour the doctrine of "Liberty and Equality" formulated by the lodges is completely refuted by Disraeli in an illuminating passage:

"The Jews represent the Semitic principle; all that is spiritual in our nature. They are the trustees of tradition and the conservators of the religious element. They are a living and the most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man."

"'Cosmopolitan fraternity'—or, as we should say to-day, 'International Socialism' is a principle which, were it possible to act on it, would deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius of the world. . . . The native tendency of the Jewish race, who are justly proud of their blood, is against the doctrine of the equality of man. They have also another characteristic, the faculty of acquisition. Although the European laws have endeavoured to prevent their obtaining property, they have nevertheless become remarkable for their accumulated wealth. Thus it will be seen that all the tendencies of the Jewish race are conservative. Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy. . . ."

In a word, then, the Jews are not genuine revolutionaries, but only throw themselves into revolutions for their own ends. Whilst professing to believe in Liberty and Equality they secretly deride such ideas, but make use of them to destroy existing governments in order to establish their own domination in religion, property, and power. Thus, according to Disraeli, it was they who played the principal part in preparing the 1848 conflagration:

"The influence of the Jews may be traced in the last outbreak of the destructive principle in Europe. An insurrection takes place against tradition and aristocracy, against religion and property. Destruction of the Semitic principle, extirpation of the Jewish religion whether in the Mosaic or in the Christian form, the natural equality of men and the abrogation of property, are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them. The people of God co-operate with atheists; the most skilful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists; the peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe! And all this because they wish to destroy that ungrateful Christendom which owes to them even its name, and whose tyranny they can no longer endure."

It is a favourite ruse of the Jews to represent the Christians as their only enemies; in reality the persecution of the Jews began long before the Christian era, nor has it since then been confined to countries where the Christian religion prevails.

If Christendom is to be accused of ingratitude for the privilege of harbouring numbers of the chosen people in her midst, the pagan world showed itself quite equally ungrateful. Egyptians, Persians, and Assyrians kept them in complete subjection; indeed, owing to their racial characteristics, it was found impossible even under the more liberal regime of Alexander the Great's successors to receive them into the community of nations.

"The sullen obstinacy with which they maintained their peculiar rites and unsocial manners," writes Gibbon, "seemed to mark them out a distinct species of men, who boldly professed, or who faintly disguised, their implacable hatred to the rest of human kind."

Here, then, rather than in Christian intolerance, may be found at least a partial explanation of the persecution of the Jews. Nor was persecution confined to one side only in the war of Semite against Gentile, for, given the opportunity, the Jews showed themselves in no way behind other races in cruelty.

"From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius," Gibbon says again, "the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives. . . . In Cyrene they massacred 220,000 Greeks; in Cyprus 240,000; in Egypt a very great multitude. Many of these unhappy victims were sawed asunder, according to a precedent to which David had given the sanction of his example."

Here follow details too horrible to transcribe. . . Continues Gibbons:

"Under the humane rule of Antoninus Pius the Jews assumed the behaviour of peaceable and industrious subjects. . . . their irreconcilable hatred of mankind, instead of flaming out in acts of blood and violence, evaporated in less dangerous gratifications. They embraced every opportunity of overreaching the idolaters in trade. . . ."

Thus since the earliest times it is as the exploiter that the Jew has been known amongst his fellow-men of all races and creeds. Moreover, he has persistently shown himself ungrateful. As Gibbon again points out, in spite of the Jews' attachment to the Mosaic religion, their forefathers who first received the law given in thunder from Mount Sinai had "perpetually relapsed into rebellion against the visible majesty of their Divine King"—even though the tides of the ocean and the course of the planets were suspended for the convenience of the Israelites," so that at last even the Almighty was led to declare: "How long will this people provoke me?"

The truth is, then, that the Jews have always formed a rebellious element in every State, and not more so in those where they were persecuted than in those where they were allowed to dwell at peace. In fact, a careful study of their character throughout history shows that the Jew is well able to endure persecution with serenity provided he is permitted to carry on his natural avocations without hindrance, whilst on the other hand he finds it impossible to exist under a benevolent regime that limits his activities. Thus in China, where the Jews were welcomed and allowed all the privileges of good citizens, the race found life unendurable because the Chinaman blandly declined to be exploited. The Jews therefore, finding it impossible to gain control of the principal wealth of the country, sought more congenial climes, and still to-day, outside the treaty ports, very few are to be found in China.

On the other hand, Germany has always been the favourite resort of the Jews. If they object to persecution, how can we explain this fact? In no other country have they been so despised as in "the Fatherland," which does not recognize the Israelites amongst its progeny. We in England, living under a regime of tolerance and "live and let live" unparalleled in any other land, can hardly conceive the bitterness, or even the existence, of Judenhetze. "The social peril is the Jew," was a phrase currrent in Germany; "the Jew," said Treitschke, "is our misfortune."

Yet in spite of these amenities the Jew has found in Germany more than in any other land his natural home. The reason may perhaps be found in the foregoing explanation of the Jewish point of view given by Disraeli. If indeed the Jew is a natural aristocrat, a disbeliever in the doctrine of equality, and an admirer of forceful government, he finds in Prussian Imperialism a system which, though oppressive of his own liberties, wins, nevertheless, his confidence and his respect. Here in the land of the jackboot and the spur he encounters few of those enervating theories of humanitarianism, those disintegrating concessions to democracy which he regards as "deteriorating to the great races and the genius of the world." In a word, the Jew has always been inclined to regard Prussia as the best investment for his money. If only he could gain some measure of control over the great military machine his position in Europe was secure.

It is thus that, as M. Claudio Jannet observes, "the Jews had always shown themselves the most active in the work of the unification of Germany," and he quotes from an article "devoted to the exaltation of Israel," in the Journal des Debats for November 5, 1879, the following remarkable words:

"In Germany from 1830 onwards the Jews play an important part: they are at the head of Young Germany. If German unity has been hastened by Prussian diplomacy and Prussian militarism, this work has been prepared, supported, and completed by them."

Here, then, is the link between the apparently incompatible elements of Judaism and Imperial Germany. In spite of Judenhetze the Jews have always had a peculiar affinity with the Prussians, so that to-day, after the ending of the Great War, we find the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (German newspaper) confidently declaring that there is "no contradiction between the desiderata of the Jews and German interests."

But before this alliance could be effected it was necessary for the Jews to establish their position in the State, and for this reason rather than from a spirit of revenge they threw themselves into the revolutionary movement. It was they who provided the driving force behind the masonic insurrection of 1848 in Germany, which started with the cry of Jewish emancipation and proclaimed as its ultimate purpose the supremacy of Prussia. This eventuality had been clearly foreseen by Disraeli, who in 1844 declared through the mouth of Sidonia, the Jewish hero of Coningsby:

"That mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany and which will be in fact a greater and a second Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of the Jews, who almost monopolize the professorial chairs of Germany."

The dialogue ends with the significant words:

"So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."

Four years after these words were written the revolution broke out in Germany exactly as Disraeli had foretold, and if it did not assume the proportions he had anticipated, the year of 1848 inaugurated the emancipation of the Jews in Germany as surely as 1790 had inaugurated it in France.

Bismarck, Lassalle, and the "Social Democrat" Party

The accession to the throne of William I, "the protector of masonry," and the ministry of Bismarck opened a fresh field to Jewish activities. For the new rulers of Prussia realized that the Jews could be very useful to their cause. Hohenzollern tradition had always recognized the utility of the despised race as agents. Frederick the Great had not disdained to employ a Jew named Ephraim for the purpose of coining false money—probably the same Ephraim whom his successor, Frederick William II., had sent as a paid agitator to finance the tumults of the French Revolution. According to a strongly pro-Semitic writer in the Revue des Deux Monde (Two World Review), for 1880, Bismarck had recourse to the Jews for replenishing his war-chests. "The Jews, were the only people who were able to use Bismarck so that all Liberal reforms in Germany from Sadowa onwards carried out with the acquiescence of Bismarck turned to the profit of the Jews."

It was this date of 1866 which sealed the definite alliance between Prussianism and Jewry. Sadowa had proved the efficiency of the Prussian military machine, and henceforth persecutors and persecuted were to march hand in hand to the conquest of world power.

But already Bismarck had found a valuable ally in the person of the Jewish "Socialist" Lassalle.

Ferdinand Lassalle, the son of a rich Hebrew merchant, was born in 1825. Tormented from his youth by hatred of the Christian races, whose blood even as a schoolboy he hoped to shed, Lassalle early embarked on a revolutionary career. "Congenitally idle," dishonest, revengeful, an avowed atheist, Lassalle declared himself a "revolutionary by principle" who "would not hesitate at a Reign of Terror as a means to secure his ends."

After the German Revolution of 1848, in which he played a leading part, Lassalle settled in Berlin, where he lived in splendour, not caring to drink wine at less than twenty or thirty marks a bottle, and entertaining his friends at gorgeous banquets.

The source of Lassalle's wealth was the Hatzfeldt property, on which he lived complacently; indeed he frankly declared that he would willingly have married any woman who could bring him two or three million thalers of revenue. Such was the man who posed as the champion of the working-classes.

But Bismarck had been quick to recognize the advantage of harnessing the Jewish agitator to the Prussian Imperial machine, and before long we find Lassalle sinking his racial hatred against the Gentiles in favour of the worst oppressors of his kind. By 1859 he had become an ardent Prussian Jingoist, subscribing to the whole policy of Bismarck, aiming at the absolute annihilation of Austria, "whose German provinces were to form an integral part of the one and indivisible German Republic"—a phrase strangely reminiscent of Anacharsis Clootz's vision of "the great Germany, the Universal Republic"—yet at the same time an enthusiastic propagandist for the Hohenzollerns. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that to the day of his death Bismarck always spoke of Lassalle with gratitude and respect.

Marx, Engles, and the 'Communist Manifest

Even more valuable to the cause of German Imperialism was the founder of the creed now known as "Marxian Socialism."

Karl Marx, the son of a Jewish lawyer whose real name was Mordechai, was born at Treves in 1818. In 1843 he settled in Paris to study economics, but his revolutionary activities led to his being expelled from France, and in 1845 he moved to Brussels, where, in collaboration with his German friend Friedrich Engels, he reorganized the Communist League, and a few years later (in 1847) published the now famous Communist Manifesto.

Soon after this he returned to Germany, where he took an active part in the 1848 Revolution, and in the same year we find him in Berlin at the head of a secret Communist society wielding the powers of life and death. For this it is said that he was condemned to death, but succeeded in escaping to London, where he settled down for the rest of his life and devoted himself to his great book Das Kapital. This ponderous work has been described as the "Bible of the working-classes."

In reality the term, if employed at all, might be more aptly applied to his earlier production, The Communist Manifesto. To the working-man Das Kapital must be completely unintelligible, for even Marxians of the educated class are totally divided as to its meaning. But to that small minority amongst the working-men that composes "the revolutionary proletariat" the meaning of The Communist Manifesto, described by Marxians as "the Charter of Freedom of the Workers of the World," is clear enough. Here are all the diatribes against the bourgeoisie and capitalists with which Marat, Hebert, and Babeuf had familiarized the people, and here in plain language are set forth the doctrines laid down in the code of Weishaupt—the abolition of inheritance, of marriage and the family, of patriotism, of all religion, the institution of the community of women, and the communal education of children by the State. This, divested of its trappings, is the real plan of Marxian Socialism, which, enveloped in the algebraical phraseology of Das Kapital, is less easy to discover.

In neither work had Marx originated anything. His theory of "wage-slavery" was, as we have seen, current during the first French Revolution, and had been continued by Vidal and Pecqueur, to whom the idea of the socialization of mines, railways, and transport was also due; his Communism was that of Babeuf, of Louis Blanc, and Cabet; his Internationalist schemes had been propounded by Weishaupt and Clootz, as also his attacks upon religion; his doctrine that "Labour is the source of all wealth" had been set forth by such early English writers as Locke, Petty, Adam Smith, and later by Robert Owen. Even his theory of surplus value was not his own but had been formulated with some vagueness by Owen, more definitely by the Chartists in their organ (The Poor Man's Guardian) in 1835, seven years before Marx began to write. When we have traced these ideas to their original sources, what then is left of Marx's system? Absolutely nothing but the form in which it was conveyed.

Werner Sombart has remarked on the peculiar aptitude of the Jewish race for making use of waste product. The Jews, it appears, are the chiffoniers par excellence of the world. This then was the particular art of Marx, who, as we know, collected all the materials for his book on Capital in the reading-room of the British Museum. It was there that he found his whole system ready to hand. Can we not see him, like some veteran Jewish rag-and-bone merchant, going over the accumulated debris of past social schemes, passing through his fingers the dry bones of dead philosophies, the shreds and tatters of worn-out doctrines, the dust and ashes of exploded theories, and with the practical cunning of the German and the Hebrew brain shrewdly recognizing the use that might be made of all this lumber by skillfully welding it into one subversive whole?

Marx then was an impostor from the beginning. Posing as the prophet of a new gospel, he was in reality nothing but a plagiarist, and a plagiarist without the common honesty to pay tribute to the sources whence he drew his material. For after pillaging freely from all the earlier Socialists Marx dismisses them with a sneer. For Owen, Fourier, and Cabet—the "Utopian Socialists" as he describes them—Marx has nothing but a light contempt, because they "consistently endeavour to suppress the class struggle and to reconcile antagonisms," whilst amongst "the Republican asses of 1848" Louis Blanc is referred to as "a high priest of the Socialist synagogue."

But it was for Proudhon that Marx reserved his bitterest animosity, as Bakunin the Anarchist, whilst still under the spell of Marx, described in an illuminating passage:

"His vanity . . . has no bounds, a veritable Jew's vanity. . . . This vanity, already very great, has been considerably increased by the adulation of his friends and disciples. Very personal, very jealous, very touchy, and very vindictive, like Jehovah the God of his people, Marx will not surfer that one should recognize any other God but himself; what do I say? that one should even render justice to another Socialist writer or worker in his presence. Proudhon, who has never been a God, but who was certainly a great revolutionary thinker, and who rendered immense services to the development of Socialist ideas, became for this reason the bete noire of Marx. To praise Proudhon in his presence was to cause him a mortal offence worthy of all the natural consequences of his enmity; and these consequences are at first hatred, then the foulest calumnies. Marx has never recoiled before falsehood, however odious, however perfidious it might be, when he thought he could make use of it without too great danger for himself against those who had the misfortune to incur his wrath."

Such was the personal character of the man represented to us to-day as the saviour of the working-classes. How far was he consistent in his championship of the "proletariat"? Here we come to the greatest irony of all in the career of Marx.

It has been seen that the principal theory proclaimed by Marx was the necessity for the overthrow of Capitalism, a system founded on the exploitation of the workers by whom all wealth is produced. Yet probably few of his followers have troubled to inquire whence Marx derived his own means of livelihood. We know that throughout his whole life he never did a stroke of manual labour—the only form of work that Marxians recognize as "productive"—and that his writings did not bring him in sufficient to maintain himself and his family in comfort. How then did Marx live? On the bounty of Friedrich Engels.

Engels has been described by the Socialist Guillaume, Secretary of the Internationale, as "a rich manufacturer accustomed to regard workmen as machine fodder and cannon fodder." His large fortune had been made out of Lancashire cotton spinning, and it was he who supplemented the meagre earnings of his collaborator. So we have the ludicrous situation of these two German opponents of Capitalism and industrial exploitation living complacently on capital accumulated from the exploitation of English workers! How in the face of this fact can any one retain a lingering belief in the genuineness of Marx's Socialism? Indeed the more we study Marx's writings—not those intended for publication, but the real expression of his opinions contained in his private correspondence—the more the conviction is borne in upon our minds that Marx never believed a word of the doctrines he professed, but that to him Socialism was merely a system to be made use of for his own ends.

It was thus that with the rise of German Social Democracy under the aegis of Lassalle, Marx, and Engels true Socialism—that is to say French Socialism—died, and its dry bones were taken over by the company which Bakunin described as "the German Jew Company," the "red bureaucracy." From this moment the vein of idealism that had run through the earlier stages of the revolutionary movement ceases entirely, and Socialism reduced from a Utopian dream to a cut-and-dried system, practical and unaspiring as the prospectus of a Germany company promoter, is seen in all its heartless materialism, its ruthless Prussianism, as it had first appeared in the code of Weishaupt.

Meanwhile Illuminism had continued to develop along the line of Anarchy. No longer represented merely by the visionary Proudhon but by the fierce Slavonic force of Bakunin, Anarchy for the first time showed itself under its true colours. Hitherto even such anarchic writers as Marat and Hebert had professed to entertain some scheme of reconstruction. Proudhon had formulated an elementary theory of Syndicalism with which to replace the existing order; it was left to Bakunin to advocate the system of Anarchy as a permanent institution, not as a transitory period necessary to traverse on the way to a regenerated social order.

Machal Bukunin, Anarchist

Michael Bakunin (or Bakounine), born in 1814, belonged to the Russian nobility, and at the age of twenty entered the artillery school at St. Petersburg. He passed his examinations brilliantly, but, always an incorrigible idler, spent most of his time, when quartered in a provincial town, lying on his bed in his dressing-gown. Before long he left the army, but took up no other profession, preferring to dabble in philosophy and to meddle in his friends' affairs, one of whom, Bielinski, driven to exasperation, wrote: "I should be capable of throwing him down and stamping on him with sabots." 2Even his intimes and fellow-Anarchists Ogareff and Herzen had little good to say of him. "I infinitely regret having nourished this reptile . . ." wrote the former; "he is a man with whom it repels me to shake hands;" whilst Herzen described him briefly as a man "with talent but a detestable character and a mauvais sujet (bad subject)." Incidentally Bakunin had applied the same description to Herzen.

Embroiled in all these private quarrels, too indolent to do any honest work, Bakunin ended by taking up the profession of a revolutionary—a career which, like many another of his kind, he found both easy and remunerative.

By dint of perpetually borrowing money from his friends, Bakunin was spared from exerting himself even in a literary way, and during the course of seven years, 1840-1847, his entire output of work consisted in six newspaper articles. Meanwhile his revolutionary energies found their vent in talk—endless, discursive talk—with his fellow revolutionaries, lasting frequently all through the night, to the accompaniment of excellent Russian tea and sandwiches. It is thus that in 1847 we have already found him discussing with Proudhon and Sazanoff the prospect of "the universal revolution."

At this period Bakunin seems not to have formulated any definite revolutionary creed, and thus, although he vaguely regarded Communism as "logically impossible," he was quite content to throw in his lot with the Communists of Paris, amongst them his future antagonist Marx. Twenty-nine years later Bakunin described their first meeting in these words:

"Marx and I are old acquaintances. I met him for the first time in Paris in 1844. . . . We were rather good friends. He was much more advanced than I was, as to-day he still is, not more advanced but incomparably more learned than I am. I knew nothing then of political economy, I had not yet got rid of metaphysical abstractions, and my Socialism was only that of instinct. He, though younger than I, was already an atheist, a learned materialist, and a thoughtful Socialist. It was precisely at this epoch that he elaborated the first foundations of his present system. We saw each other fairly often, for I respected him very much for his knowledge and for his devotion, passionate and serious though always mingled with personal vanity, to the cause of the proletariat, and I eagerly sought his conversation, which was always instructive and witty when it was not inspired by petty hatred, which, alas! occurred too frequently. There was never, however, any frank intimacy between us. Our temperaments did not permit of it. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I was right also."

It is easy to read between the lines here, to see how from the beginning Bakunin was simply a tool in the hands of Marx. The shrewd German Jew clearly recognized the value of the Russian as a huge dynamic force to be made use of and then cast aside when it had served his purpose.

Before the Revolution of 1848, Bakunin, like Marx, was expelled from Paris, but after the explosion of February he contrived to return and join himself to the extreme party, with whom he passed his nights preaching revolution, equality of salaries, the levelling down of all classes in the name of Equality.

But Caussidiere and Flocon, exasperated by his tirades, finally sent him off on a mission to the Slavs, in the hope of his breaking his neck. "What a man! What a man!" said Caussidiere. "The first day of a revolution he is a treasure, the second he is only good to shoot."

Herzen, who records this expression of opinion, adds that Caussidiere himself needed shooting the day before the revolution began.

Bakunin's journey eastwards effectively rid France of his presence for many years; for after taking part in the revolutionary outbreaks in Russia, Prague, and finally in Dresden, he was arrested at Chemnitz and imprisoned first at Altenburg, then at Koenigstein, then taken in chains to Prague, transferred to Olmiitz, where he remained chained to the wall for five months, and last of all given over to the Russian Government, by which he was imprisoned in the fortress of Peter and Paul in May 1851. Two months later Count Orloff came to visit him and urged him to write a confession of his misdeeds to the Emperor as to a father confessor. Bakunin complied, but Nicholas I. on reading the document observed briefly:

"He is a brave boy with a lively wit, but he is a dangerous man and must be kept under lock and key."

Accordingly Bakunin remained in prison, for a time in St. Peter and Paul, later at Schlusselbourg, where he remained three years, during which time he contracted scurvy and all his teeth fell out.

On the accession of Alexander II. a fresh demand was made for a reprieve, but the new Emperor, on being shown Bakunin's "confession" to his predecessor, remarked, "I see not the least repentance in this letter," and sent him to Siberia.

Here Bakunin spent four quite pleasant years; free to move about, he actually, for the only time in his life, took up a little work, and finally married a Polish girl who "shared all his aspirations." "I am completely happy," he wrote in 1860. "Ah! how sweet it is to live for others, especially when it is for a charming woman."

But peace and quiet could not content the restless spirit of Bakunin for long. The revolutionary fever was on him and he craved to be back again at his old game of agitation. The emancipation of the serfs, which took place in the following year, stirred him but mildly; in this immense concession to the cause of liberty he saw only a means of shaking the Imperial authority, and at the end of this same year he succeeded in escaping from Siberia, whence he travelled across Japan and America to London. Here Bakunin, received with open arms by Ogareff and Herzen, found himself once more in a congenial atmosphere. Surrounded by conspirators of all nationalities he was able to get to work on fresh plots, on schemes for stirring up the Poles, and organizing revolutions everywhere. Herzen has thus described his activities at this crisis:

"Bakunin renewed his youth; he was in his element. It is not only the rumbling of insurrection, the noise of the clubs, the tumult in the streets and public places, nor even the barricades that made up his happiness; he loved also the movement of the day before, the work of preparation, that life of agitation, yet at the same time rendered continuous by conferences—those sleepless nights, those parleyings and negotiations, rectifications, chemical ink, cyphers, and signs agreed upon beforehand."

And Herzen, who took revolution more seriously, adds that Bakunin "excited himself exactly as if it were a question of preparing a Christmas tree—that annoyed me."

It is easy to understand that to a man of Bakunin's temperament an existence of this kind—maintained as ever by the charity of his friends—was infinitely preferable to a life of honest toil such as most human beings are condemned to lead. Indeed in the above description we find the key to many an agitator's career, and we cannot wonder that as long as revolution provides constitutional idlers with a lucrative and amusing profession the world should continue to toss on the waves of unrest.

I have dwelt at some length on the character and career of Bakunin because more than any one he seems to me to embody the spirit of Anarchy—a spirit widely different, indeed diametrically opposed to that of State Socialism. The Anarchist is undoubtedly a more amiable being than the State Socialist; instead of wishing to cut every one down to the same pattern, he desires, on the contrary, to give all men unbounded liberty to develop along whatever lines they please—the idler should be free to idle and live on other men's labour, the drunkard to drink himself into a condition of maudlin imbecility, the murderer to cut throats until he wearies of the pastime, the thief to continue helping himself to other people's goods until he has accumulated enough to satisfy him.

Exaggerated Individualism is the keynote of his system: liberty, not equality, is his goal. His belief in the amiability of human nature endows him with a bonhomie not to be found amongst the Communists, who regard their fellow-men as creatures to be dragooned into obedience to the dictates of the State, by which of course they mean themselves. The difference between the two is that which exists between the amiable eccentric who, believing in the innate benevolence of the entire animal kingdom, wishes to open all the cages in a menagerie and leave the wild beasts free to roam about the world, and the lion-tamer who loves at the crack of his whip to see king of beasts and performing poodle alike meekly rotating on a merry-go-round.

It is easy, therefore, to understand that Anarchists, far more than their dour opponents the State Socialists, have succeeded in endearing themselves to the people with whom they came in contact. The vision of "the Russian giant" in his big hat was remembered affectionately long afterwards by the inhabitants of Lugano, where Bakunin spent some years, and later on his disciple Prince Kropotkine made himself beloved in London drawing-rooms.

The truth is that to the Western mind such beings are impossible of comprehension. Deceived by the outward urbanity of the Anarchists, it fails to realize that beneath the smiling surface there lurks a tiger ready to be aroused by the smell of blood; it cannot believe that people can really exist who love violence for its own sake, who crave to burn and murder and destroy.

But in Eastern Europe creatures of this kind have always existed, and we find the exact prototype of Bakunin in the Baron Ungern von Sternberg who had pursued a career of crime at the beginning of the century in his island of Dago. The favourite pastime of this robber baron, who had vowed hatred to the whole human race, the Emperor in particular, was to lure ships to their destruction by means of a lighthouse installed in the tower of his castle.

"As soon as a vessel was on the point of wrecking, the baron descended to the beach, embarked secretly with several clever and determined men whom he kept to help him in his nocturnal expeditions; he received the foreign mariners, finished them off in the darkness instead of rescuing them, and after having strangled them he pillaged their ship; all this less by cupidity than by pure love of evil, by a disinterested zeal for destruction. Disbelieving in everything, and above all in justice, he regarded moral and social disorder as the closest analogy to the state of man here below and civil and political virtues as harmful chimeras, since they only oppose Nature without subduing it."

This was precisely the creed of Bakunin, who, if he had lived a hundred years earlier, before brigandage had been sanctified by the revolutionary Socialists and Anarchists of France, would doubtless have found a vent for his energies on the same lines as the robber baron, instead of masquerading as a champion of the people.

Such a dynamic force as Bakunin provided could not fail to be of immense value to the revolutionary movement, and it was thus that, during his stay in London, Marx—who incidentally had taken the opportunity of Bakunin' s incarceration at Koenigstein in 1850 to declare that he was an agent of the Russian Government—came round to his lodgings and assured him that he had not intended to calumniate him in the past.

International Association of Working-men

The fact is that Marx was now very busy at the great scheme of his life and needed all the co-operation he could muster—this scheme was the organization of the famous "Internationale."

In order to understand the origin of this association it is necessary to go back two years, that is to say to 1862, the year of the Great Exhibition in the Cromwell Road.

Now whilst Anarchists and State Socialists were striving for the mastery over the revolutionary movement, the working-men of France had begun dimly to realize that if they hoped to improve their lot it was to themselves they must look for salvation and not to the theorists who had hitherto led them to disaster. Accordingly in 1862 a deputation of French working-men was sent to England on a visit to the Great Exhibition to study technical questions connected with labour, and during the course of their stay they had the opportunity to observe the utility of Trade Unions in protecting the interests of the workers. This system was denied to them, for the "coalitions of workingmen" suppressed in the first French Revolution still remained under the ban, and the Frenchmen now resolved to form a new association on their own account. Although imbued with the "mutualist" theories of Proudhon their programme was in no way revolutionary, and they hoped by pacific means to bring about a reorganization of the industrial system.

An interesting little book which has now become very rare, The Secret History of the International, published in 1872, had admirably described the attitude towards the social problem of two of these men, Tolain and Fribourg, bronze-workers of Paris who visited London in 1864.

"They talked of peace, of study, of arrangement, of association. . . A better knowledge of each other, a more frequent interchange of thought, a clearer view of the great laws which govern rise and fall in wages, and a means of stretching friendly hands from town to town, from sea to sea in case of need— these are the ends we have in view, they urged, not secret plots and wine-shop agitations."

The path of peaceful progress was paved the more smoothly by the action of Napoleon III., who in May of this same year repealed the laws against Trade Unions and replaced them by a fresh edict threatening with punishment any concerted attempt, either on the part of employers or employed, to paralyse industry by malicious strikes or lock-outs. This year of 1864, as Mermeix points out, was thus "a great date in the history of the workers in France," for the new law "at last establishes equality of rights between the masters and the working-men," and if firmly applied should have accustomed them to respect each other. "It would not have permitted the method of direct action, which is nothing but a series of fraudulent manoeuvres concerted and carried out."

There was, recourse to violent methods for the redress of social evils. But the work of the World Revolutionists is always to strangle true reforms at their birth, and the new liberty accorded to the workers proved the signal for fresh agitation on their part. In the Working-men's Association they saw the very instrument they needed for carrying out their plans. Karl Marx was then in London and frequently to be found in the clubs and cafes where the working-men forgathered. "In evil hour," says the Secret History, "the Paris bronziers met this learned and unsmiling Jew." From that moment the cause of the workers was lost.

It was not that Marx immediately introduced himself into the movement. On the contrary, at the meeting in St. Martin's Hall on September 28, 1864, when the Internationale was definitely founded, Marx played no part at all. "I was present," he wrote to Engels, "only as a dumb personage on the platform." But he was named, nevertheless, a member of the sub-committee, the other members being Mazzini's secretary—a Polish Jew named Wolff—Le Lubez, a French Freemason, Cremer, the secretary of the English Masons' Union, and Weston, the Owenite.

At the first meeting of this committee Wolff placed before it the statutes of Mazzini's working-men's associations, proposing them as the basis of the new association; Le Lubez suggested amendments described by Marx as "perfectly childish." "I was firmly resolved," he wrote, "not to leave a single line if possible of all their balderdash." In a few weeks he had succeeded in establishing his authority. "My propositions were all accepted by the commission; they only insisted on the introduction in the Preamble of the statutes, of two phrases on duties and rights, and on truth, morality, and justice; but I placed them in such a way that it can do no harm." The Provisional Statutes of the Internationale thus amended by Marx were then sent from London to Paris in the following November and accepted by the members of the association.

In all these manoeuvres Marx had again displayed his skill in making use of the ideas of others to serve his own purpose. Just as he had succeeded in appropriating the theories of earlier Socialists and passing them off as his own invention, so he now contrived to gain the reputation of having founded the Internationale, an achievement we shall find habitually attributed to him by Marxian writers. But on this point we have further the conclusive evidence of James Guillaume, a Swiss member of the association and its principal chronicler:

"It is not true that the Internationale was the creation of Karl Marx. He remained completely outside the preparatory work that took place from 1862 to 1864. He joined the Internationale at the moment when the initiative of the English and French workmen had just created it. Like the cuckoo he came and laid his egg in a nest which was not his own. His plan from the first day was to make the great working-men's organization the instrument of his personal views."

But Marx was not the only intriguer to introduce himself into the movement. Monsieur Drumont has admirably described the manner in which middle-class theorists, entirely unsympathetic to the workers, succeeded in capturing the association:

"In its origin the French Internationale was far from being revolutionary, from seeking disturbances in the streets, from liking insurrection for insurrection's sake. The Emperor Napoleon III., the only sovereign since 1789 who had sincerely interested himself in the working-classes, who understood their sufferings and desired to improve their lot, had followed the progress of the new association with sympathy. . . . It was only after a time that bourgeois agitators could make the Internationale deviate from its goal. This fact is ceaselessly repeated in everything the proletarians attempt. The bourgeois Capitalist exploits them as workers; when they deliberate together in order to consider means for improving their lot, the bourgeois Revolutionary, that is to say the needy bourgeois who wants to become a Capitalist, always finds a way of introducing himself into these associations and of making them serve for the satisfaction of his ambitions."

It was through the secret societies that these bourgeois elements found their way into the new association. Fribourg himself has declared that "the Internationale everywhere found support in Freemasonry," that is to say, in the lodges of the Grand Orient, and M. Louis Enault records that:

"In March 1865 all the secret associations of Europe and North America were merged in the International Association of Working-men, including The Marianne, the Freres de la Republique of Lyons and Marseilles, the Fenians of Ireland, the innumerable secret societies of Russia and Poland, the remains of the Carbonari, joined up with the new society. This fusion was made."

The Internationale, though itself an open and avowed association, thus became through its absorption of these existing secret organizations a huge semi-secret society—that is to say, it formed the outer shell that covered a ramification of conspiracies alien to the ideas of its founders and of which the secrets were known only to its middle-class directors.

The anti-religious policy adopted by the Internationale was the work of these secret influences. In this same year of 1865 a great students' Congress took place in Liege, at which Fontaine declared:

^What we wish for, we revolutionaries and socialists, is physical, moral, and intellectual development of the human race. Note that I say physical first, intellectual afterwards. We wish, in the moral order, by the annihilation of all prejudices of religion and the Church, to arrive at the negation of God and at free examination."

And Lafargue, after chanting the praises of "our grand master Proudhon" at a further sitting of the Congress held in Brussels, had ended with the cry:

"War on God! Hatred towards God! That is progress! We must shatter Heaven like a vault of a paper!"

A number of these men—proudly claimed by the Freemasons as members of their Order—crowded into the Internationale, which thus became permeated with the spirit of Illuminism. At a meeting of the association Garibaldi, venturing to propose that "faith in God should be adopted by the Congress," met with a stony silence, and was obliged to qualify the suggestion with the explanation that by the religion of God he meant the religion of Reason—the worship of the goddess of Reason, he added later, such as was practised in the French Revolution.

The working-men took no part in these blasphemies. When Jaclard declared that outside Atheism there was no hope for man—"To be religious is to be ridiculous"— Fribourg, the bronze-worker, Chaudey, and Lemonnier "combated these views in the name of liberal Paris and of liberal France." "For," as the author of the Secret History truly adds, "these are not so much the views of working-men as of professors and philosophers." Indeed the vine-growers of Neuchatal so little understood the aims of the Internationale as to declare naively that the principal article of their branch of the association should be: "Every vine-dresser must have a Bible and not neglect divine service"—a suggestion received with derision by their middle-class directors.

It is difficult to write of these things calmly. For to deceive the people, whose simple faith and lack of education prevent them seeing whither they are being led, is as cowardly as to guide a blind man into a ditch. Yet this is what the exploiters of the Internationale did for the working-men. The identity of these middle-class interlopers who assembled at the Second Congress of the association in Lausanne in 1867 has thus been given by the author of the Secret History;

"One delegate from Belgium, six delegates from England, seventeen from France, six from Germany, two from Italy, and thirty-one from Switzerland, came together in a room of the Casino at Lausanne. Three only of the deputies from England were of English name. England was mainly represented by two German tailors and a French fiddle-maker. Germany was represented by two doctors, one professor, an hotel-keeper, a machinist, and a gentleman of no profession that he cared to name. Italy was represented by two doctors, Stamfa and Tomasi. Four professors, three journalists, and a commercial agent represented the toilers of Zurich and Geneva. Observe that here is not a gathering of the craftsmen, bent on study of the questions which affect them in their hours of work and in their rate of pay, but an assembly of middle-class dreamers and theorists."

The "English" deputies here referred to are further described by James Guillaume. The tailor Eccarius, friend and disciple of Marx, was "a long personage with an unkempt beard, hair falling carelessly over his eyes, always stuffing his nose with tobacco"; the other German tailor, Lessner, was:

"The true type of bearded democrat with burning eyes"—"his role seemed to be to protest perpetually. During discussion Eccarius speaks slowly with an imperturbable phlegm; Lessner cannot contain himself and exhales his passionate soul in a torrent of violent and bitter words; before an unintelligent contradictor Eccarius shrugs his shoulders, Lessner bounds about and seems to wish to devour his adversary."

Eugene Dupont, the Frenchman and future president of the Congress, belonged to quite a different type: "A young man of thirty resembling all young men with a moustache . . . I remark in him," adds Guillaume, "nothing but an innocent fondness for punning." Another London member, this time an Englishman, not present at this Congress, was an eccentric millionaire named Cowell Stepney, "deaf as a post," an enthusiastic Communist and member of the General Council.

The International Association of Working-men had become a farce. In vain the real workmen from Paris had protested at the First Congress in Geneva against the invasion of their ranks by men who were not manual workers, declaring that if the workers' Congress "were to be composed in greater part by economists, journalists, lawyers, and employers, the thing would be ridiculous and would annihilate the Association."

Marxists and Anarchists Struggle for Contorl

Marx, who in his Preamble of the Provisional Rules of the Internationale had himself declared that "the emancipation of the working-classes must be brought about by the working-classes themselves," waxed indignant at what he described as "the manoeuvre of Tolain and Fribourg" in "invoking the principle that only working-men can represent working-men," and the French workmen's motion was defeated by 25 votes to 20.

Marx indeed did not conceal his contempt for the originators of the Internationale. A month after the Congress he wrote to his young Jewish friend Dr. Kugelmann:

"The working-men, particularly those from Paris . . . belong as luxury workers (i.e. engravers on bronze) no doubt strongly to the old filth (dem alten Dreck angehoren.) Ignorant, vain, pretentious, garrulous, swollen with pomposity, they were on the point of spoiling everything, having rushed to the Congress in numbers which in no way corresponded to that of their adherents. In the report I shall clandestinely rap them over the knuckles."

As M. Guillaume truly observes: "All Marx is already in this letter."

The English delegates fared no better at his hands, for in the following year we find him writing in this strain to Engels:

"I shall go personally to the next Congress at Brussels so as to give the coup de grace to those asses of Proudhoniens . . . in the official Report of the General Council—for in spite of their efforts the Parisian chatterboxes have not been able to prevent our re-election—I shall give them the stick. The swinehounds amongst the English trade unionists who thought we were going too far will not catch us up easily. . . . Things are advancing, and at the first revolution, which is perhaps' nearer than it seems, we, that is to say, you and I, will have this powerful instrument in our hands. . . . We can really be well satisfied!"

In the light of these passages it is amusing to find one of Marx's admirers explaining that "the essence of Marxian Socialism is that the working-classes must themselves work out their own salvation."

It was, moreover, not only the industrial "proletariat" of France that Marx despised, but also those dwellers in the country districts who remained contentedly at work on their own bit of land—an arrangement, of course, directly opposed to the principles of Communism.

"The Bonapartes," he had written contemptuously after 1852, "are the dynasty of the peasants, that is to say, of the mass of the French nation." This dynasty, he goes on to point out, is therefore represented not by the revolutionary peasant "who wishes to overthrow the old order," but by "the conservative peasant," who, "stupidly bound by the old order, wishes to see himself saved and protected with his portion of the soil under the shadow of the Empire."

If then it was the prosperity of the French peasant that roused Marx's ire, we might at least expect him to extend some sympathy towards the poor and destitute amongst the working-classes. Not at all. This portion of the people is designated by him as the "Lumpenproletariat," that is to say, the "ragged proletariat," for which, as Bakunin pointed out with indignation, "Marx, Engels, and all the school of Social Democrats of Germany display a profound contempt." What section of the "proletariat" then did Marx approve? Obviously the section that showed itself submissive to his dictates.

The respective attitudes of Marx and of Bakunin towards the people much resembled those of Robespierre and Marat, their predecessors in the rival schools of State Socialism and Anarchy. To Robespierre the people whose "sovereignty" he proclaimed consisted simply of his own following amongst the men, and more particularly the women, of the Paris Faubourgs (suburbs); to Marx, the proletariat, whose dictatorship he advocated, was represented by the small number of working-men who showed themselves willing to play into the hands of their German and Jewish exploiters. But both to Marat and to Bakunin the people meant merely the turbulent elements amongst the populace—wastrels, criminals, drunkards, thieves, and vagabonds. Bakunin proposing his favourite toast, "To the destruction of all law and order and the unchaining of evil passions!" might well have been the soul of the Spanish dwarf reincarnated in the body of the Russian giant. For criminals he expressed his predilection quite frankly:

"Only the proletariat in rags is inspired by the spirit and force of the coming social revolution, and in no way the bourgeois stratum of the working masses."

His hopes even in the moujiks of Russia were disappointed, owing to the patriarchal conditions of their lives and their respect for the Emperor, so that it is to the brigands that he looks for salvation.

"The only man who in the midst of the Russian people has the audacity to revolt against the Commune is the brigand. Thence brigandage constitutes an important phenomenon in the history of the Russian people—the first revolutionaries of Russia, Pougatcheff and Stenka Razine, were brigands.

"Robbery," Bakunin writes again, "is one of the most honourable forms of Russian national life. The brigand is the hero, the defender, the po-oular avenger, the irreconcilable enemy of the State, and of all social and civil order established by the State. He is the wrestler in life and in death against all this civilization of officials, of nobles, of priests, and of the crown."

In all this Bakunin showed himself a true and faithful follower of Weishaupt—was the robber baron of Dago perhaps an Illuminatus too?—and it is here that we find the explanation of his creed. Until the dawn of Illuminism crime and virtue, good and evil, held their opposing positions in the conceptions of the human mind. Even in pagan Greece Kerkuon and Procrustes found no apologists, but ranked simply as monsters of whom it was necessary to rid the world. It was left to Weishaupt to confuse the issues, to glorify by the name of "useful larceny" what had hitherto been described by the ugly name of theft, and to Brissot, the adept of illuminized Freemasonry, to declare theft to be a virtue. And it was Weishaupt who had first set out to destroy that religion and civilization which Bakunin and the Baron von Sternberg alike detested.

Bakunin then must not be regarded as a solitary demoniac, but as an exponent of those doctrines of Illuminism which found a fruitful soil in his wild Russian nature. On this point we have definite evidence, for the Socialist Malon, who was a member of the Internationale and personally acquainted with the Russian Anarchist, has explicitly stated that "Bakunin was a disciple of Weishaupt." It is only necessary to study the writings of Bakunin in order to recognize the truth of this statement.

Moreover, in the same year of 1864 that the Internationale was founded, Bakunin and his disciple Netchaieff started a society on precisely the lines of the Illuminati. The plan of such conspirators has always been to envelop one secret society in another on the system of a nest of Chinese boxes, the outer one large and visible, the inner ones dwindling down to the tiny, almost invisible cell that contains the secret. This was the plan of Weishaupt, effected by his grades of adepts, initiated by successive stages into the greater and the lesser mysteries; and this too was the plan of Bakunin and his confederate Netchaieff. The society organized by them consisted of three orders: (1) the International Brothers, (2) the National Brothers, and (3) the International Alliance of Social Democracy, which in its turn covered the inner secret society called the "Fraternal Alliance," over which Bakunin exercised supreme control.

We have only to compare the programme of the International Social Democratic Alliance with the plan of Weishaupt to recognize the evident connection between the two. Placed in parallel columns the aims of both will be seen to be identical:

Weishaupt

"The order of the Illuminati abjured Christianity. ... In the lodges death was declared an eternal sleep; patriotism and loyalty were called narrowminded prejudices incompatible with universal benevolence; further, they accounted all princes usurpers and tyrants, and all privileged orders as their abettors. They meant to abolish the laws which protected property accumulated by long-continued and successful industry; and to prevent for the future any such accumulation. They intended to establish universal liberty and equality, the imprescriptible rights of man, and as preparation for all this they intended to root out all religion and ordinary morality, and even to break the bonds of domestic life by destroying the veneration for marriage vows, and by taking the education of children out of the hands of the parents."

Bakunin

"The Alliance professes Atheism. It aims at the abolition of religious services, the replacement of belief by knowledge and divine by human justice, the abolition of marriage as a political, religious, and civic arrangement. Before all, it aims at the definite and complete abolition of all classes and the political, economic, and social equality of the individual of either sex. The abolition of inheritance. All children to be brought up on a uniform system, so that artificial inequalities may disappear. . . .

"It aims directly at the triumph of the cause of labour over capital. It repudiates so-called patriotism and the rivalry of nations and desires the universal association of all local associations by means of freedom.

"The final aim of this society was 'to accelerate the universal revolution.'"

Now how is it possible to suppose that the extraordinary similarity between these two programmes can be due to mere coincidence? In the Alliance of Bakunin, as in the Communist Manifesto of Marx, we find again all the points of Weishaupt—abolition of property, inheritance, marriage, and all morality, of patriotism and all religion. Is it not obvious that the plan had been handed down to the succeeding groups of Socialists and Anarchists by the secret societies which had carried on the traditions of the Illuminati, and that Bakunin, and still more his coadjutor Netchaieff, was simply an Illuminatus?

Netchaieff moreover, is a type of no small importance to the history of social revolution. Uninspired by such anarchic philosophy as that proclaimed by Weishaupt and Bakunin, Netchaieff showed himself a pure destructionist whose ferocity was untempered by the genial moods of Bakunin.

"He was a liar, a thief, and a murderer—the incarnation of Hatred, Malice, and Revenge, who stopped at no crime against friend or foe that promised to advance what he was pleased to call the Revolution."

In the Revolutionary Catechism he composed in conjunction with Bakunin the following passages occur:

"The revolutionary must let nothing stand between him and the work of destruction. . . . For him exists only one single pleasure, one single consolation, one reward, one satisfaction—the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, but one aim—implacable destruction. . . . If he continues to live in this world it is only in order to annihilate it all the more surely."

For this reason no reforms were to be advocated; on the contrary:

"Every effort is to be made to heighten and increase the evil and sorrows which will at length wear out the patience of the people and encourage an insurrection en masse." The second category of the association was therefore to be composed of "people to whom we concede life provisionally in order that by a series of monstrous acts they may drive the people into inevitable revolt."

In other words, oppressors of the people were to be encouraged.

To the sane mind it is almost impossible to believe that any man could put forward such theories, but this is precisely the advantage obtained by the advocates of World Revolution—their doctrines are so monstrous that they appear unbelievable to the world in general. Yet here is no possibility of misrepresentation, for the Revolutionary Catechism may be seen in print by any one who cares to look at it.

But like many another conspirator, from Weishaupt onwards, Bakunin found himself outwitted by his coadjutor. Perfectly unscrupulous as to the means he employed he had at first welcomed Netchaieff as "a force," but by degrees he came to realize the danger he himself incurred by allying himself with a man who failed to recognize even the principle of "honour among thieves." Towards 1870 Bakunin discovered that Netchaieff, whilst pretending to be his most devoted disciple, had all the while been a member of another society still more secret than the Alliance Sociale Democratique, and of which he had never divulged the inner mysteries to his master.

"Netchaieff," Bakunin wrote to Talandier, "is a devoted fanatic, but at the same time a very dangerous fanatic, and one with whom an alliance could only be disastrous to every one. This is why: He was first a member of an occult committee which really had existed in Russia. This committee no longer exists; all its members have been arrested. Netchaieff alone remains, and alone he constitutes what he calls the committee. The Russian organization having been destroyed, he is trying to create a new one abroad. All this would be perfectly natural, legitimate, and very useful, but the way he goes to work is detestable. Keenly impressed by the catastrophe which has just destroyed the secret organization in Russia, he has gradually arrived at the conclusion that in order to found a serious and indestructible society one must take for a basis the policy of Machiavelli, and adopt in full the system of the Jesuits— bodily violence and a lying soul.

"Truth, mutual confidence, serious and severe solidarity exist only between about ten individuals who form the sanctum sanctorum of the society. All the rest must serve as a blind instrument and as matter to be exploited by the hands of these ten men really solidarized. It is permitted, and even ordered, that one should deceive them, compromise them, steal from them, and even if needs be ruin them—they are conspiracy fodder . . ."

Then Bakunin goes on to describe Netchaieff s methods:

"In the name of the cause he must get hold of your whole person without your knowing it. In order to do this he will spy on you and try to get hold of your secrets, and for that purpose, in your absence, left alone in your room he will open all your drawers, read all your correspondence, and when a letter seems interesting to him, that is to say, compromising from any point of view for you or for one of your friends, he will seal it and keep it carefully as a document against you or against your friend. . . .

"When convicted of this in a general assembly he dared to say to us: 'Well, yes, it is our system. We consider as enemies, whom it is our duty to deceive and compromise, all those who are not completely with us. . . .'"

"If you have introduced him to a friend, his first thought will be to raise discord, gossip and intrigue between you—in a word, to make you quarrel. Your friend has a wife, a daughter, he will try to seduce her, to give her a child, in order to drag her away from official morality and throw her into an attitude of forced revolutionary protest against society. All personal ties, all friendship are considered by them as an evil which it is their duty to destroy, because all this constitutes a force which, being outside the secret organization, diminishes the unique force of the latter. Do not cry out that I am exaggerating; all this has been amply developed and proved by me."

It will be seen that all these were the exact principles and methods laid down by Weishaupt for the Illuminati.

Now it is curious to find the description of the inner ring of secret intrigue described by Bakunin in the above quoted letter exactly corroborated by a very different authority, namely, the book of Gougenot des Mousseaux, entitled The Jew, Judaism and Judaization of the peoples Christians, published just a year earlier, in 1869.

It was in December 1865, that is to say, a year after Bakunin had formed his Alliance in conjunction with Netchaieff, that Des Mousseaux received a letter from a Protestant statesman in the service of a great Germanic power, saying:

"Since the revolutionary recrudescence of 1845, I have had relations with a Jew who, from vanity, betrayed the secret of the secret societies with which he had been associated, and who warned me eight or ten days beforehand of all the revolutions which were about to break out at any point of Europe. I owe to him the unshakable conviction that all these movements of 'oppressed people,' etc., etc., are devised by half-a-dozen individuals, who give their orders to the secret societies of all Europe. The ground is absolutely mined beneath our feet, and the Jews provide a large contingent of these miners. . . . The Jewish bankers will soon be, through their prodigious fortunes, our lords and masters. . . . All the great Radical newspapers of Germany are in the hands of Jews."

It is impossible to suppose any collusion between men of opinions so divergent as the Royalist Catholic Des Mousseaux, his friend the Protestant statesman, and the Russian Anarchists Bakunin and Netchaieff. We must, therefore, admit that each must have reached his conclusions independently of the other, and the extraordinary similarity between their two accounts tends most certainly to confirm the assertion that this mysterious association really existed.

Of whom was it composed? According to Des Mousseaux it was largely controlled by Jews who had insinuated themselves into the Masonic Lodges and secret societies, and curiously enough it was in October of this same year, 1869, that Bakunin, who had been attacked by certain Jews in the Internationale, wrote his Study on the German Jews, where he repeats precisely the same story of Jewish intrigue. The passage in question runs as follows:

"I begin by begging you to believe that I am in no way the enemy nor the detractor of the Jews. Although I may be considered a cannibal, I do not carry savagery to that point, and I assure you that in my eyes all nations have their worth. Each is, moreover, an ethnographically historic product, and is consequently responsible neither for its faults nor its merits. It is thus that we may observe in connection with the modern Jews that their nature lends itself little to frank Socialism. Their history, long before the Christian era, implanted in them an essentially mercantile and bourgeois tendency, with the result that, considered as a nation, they are par excellence the exploiters of other men's work, and they have a natural horror and fear of the popular masses, whom they despise, moreover, whether openly or in secret.

"The habit of exploitation, whilst developing the intelligence of the exploiters, gives it an exclusive and disastrous bent and quite contrary to the interests as well as to the instincts of the proletariat. I know that in expressing with this frankness my intimate opinion on the Jews I expose myself to enormous dangers. Many people share it, but very few dare publicly to express it, for the Jewish sect, very much more formidable than that of the Jesuits, Catholic or Protestant, constitutes today a veritable power in Europe. It reigns despotically in commerce, in the banks, and it has invaded three-quarters of German journalism and a very considerable portion of the journalism of other countries. Woe, then, to him who has the clumsiness to displease it!"

But Bakunin had underestimated the control of the Jews over the press. The great anarchist might tilt with impunity against principalities and powers, might incite to murder, pillage, and rebellion, but the moment he attempted to attack the Jews he was unable to obtain a hearing, and his polemique never saw the light until his works were published thirty or forty years later. The same failure had attended the efforts of the Hebertiste Tridon, who at about the same date wrote a denunciation of the Jews which could not be published during his lifetime.

It will be seen that for all their destructive energy the French and Russian anarchists were no match for the German Jews of the Internationale into which Bakunin and his Alliance had been admitted in August 1869. Indeed Bakunin clearly stood in awe of Marx, for in the above-quoted letter he is careful to specify that he includes in his strictures only "the crowd of Jewish pygmies" who had penetrated into the Socialist movement, and exempts "the two Jewish giants Marx and Lassalle," and ten months earlier he had written to Marx himself in terms of the most servile flattery:

"You ask whether I continue to be your friend." Yes, more than ever, dear Marx. . . . You see, dear friend, that I am your disciple, and I am proud of it."

But in a letter to Herzen on October 28, 1869, Bakunin explains his attitude to Marx and his reason for conferring on him the title of giant.

"Marx, who detests me and who, I imagine, loves no one but himself . . . is nevertheless a man very useful to the Internationale . . . If at the present moment I had undertaken a war against Marx three quarters of the members of the Internationale would have turned against me. and I should have been at a disadvantage. . . ."

Although from the beginning Marx had hoped to make the Working-Men's Association the instrument of his personal views, it was not until 1868 that he succeeded in definitely directing its policy along his line of State Socialism. At the first two congresses, of Geneva in 1866 and Lausanne in 1867, the theories of the French Proudhoniens still prevailed; the Congress at Brussels in 1868 showed, however, the parting of the ways by declaring that the machines and instruments of work should belong to the workers, but all public services—railways, mines, etc.—to the community. This programme was therefore a blend of the system later to be known as Syndicalism and of the Communism of Vidal and Pecqueur which had been adopted by Marx.

At the Fourth Congress in Basle in 1869 the policy of the Association veered still further towards Communism by the abolition of private property in land and of inheritance. The programme of Weishaupt had thus been accepted almost in its entirety by the Internationale.

Fribourg, who with the other French workers of the association opposed the abolition of private property in land, points out that the history of the Internationale must be divided into two periods, the first up to the Congress of Lausanne "mutualist," that is to say, demanding free control of industry, the second period Russo-German, when the association "became Communist, that is to say authoritative."

From this policy, as also from the principle of class hatred upheld both by Marx and Bakunin, Fribourg disassociates himself and his comrades entirely. "I insist," he writes, "that it should be known that no upright mind could have conceived the idea of giving birth to a society of war and hatred." And since this is what it had become, Fribourg declares that by 1869 "the Internationale of the French founders was dead, quite dead." "The working-men's International," remarks Duhring, "was no longer working-class, in the sense that it manoeuvred, used, and exploited the workers of different countries."

Such then were the intrigues of the men who called themselves the champions of the "proletariat."

All talk of conditions of labour, all discussion of the practical problems of industry had been abandoned and the Internationale became simply an engine of warfare against civilization. By its absorption of the secret societies and of the doctrines of Illuminism all the machinery of revolution passed into its keeping. Every move in the game devised by Weishaupt, every method for engineering disturbances and for spreading inflammatory propaganda, became part of its programme.

So just as the Jacobin Club had openly executed the hidden plan of the Illuminati, the Internationale, holding within it the same terrible secrets, carried on the work of World Revolution in the full light of day.