The breach came at the Hague Congress in September 1872. Sixty-five delegates were present, including Marx himself, who with his followers, after animated discussion, expelled the anarchist party, and then removed the seat of the General Council to New York. The congress concluded with a meeting at Amsterdam, of which the chief feature was a remarkable speech from Marx. ‘In the eighteenth century,’ he said, ‘kings and potentates used to assemble at the Hague to discuss the interests of their dynasties. At the same place we resolved to hold the assize of labour’—a contrast which with world-historic force did undoubtedly mark the march of time. ‘He could not deny that there were countries, like America, England—and, as far as he knew its institutions, Holland also—where the workmen could attain their goal by peaceful means; but in most European countries force must be the lever of revolution, and to force they must appeal when the time came.’ Thus it was a principle of Marx to prefer peaceful methods where peaceful methods are permitted, but resort to force must be made when necessary. Force also is an economic power. He concluded by expressing his resolve that in the future, as in the past, his life would be consecrated to the triumph of the social cause. The transfer of the General Council of the Marx International from London to New York was the beginning of the end. It survived just long enough to hold another congress at Geneva in 1873, and then quietly expired. The party of destruction, styling themselves _autonomists_ and led by Bakunin, had a bloodier history. The programme of this party, as we shall see in our chapter on Anarchism, was to overturn all existing institutions, with the view to reconstructing them on a communal basis. This it endeavoured to realise by the great communal risings in Southern Spain in 1873, when its adherents set up their special form of government at Barcelona, Seville, Cadiz, and Cartagena—at the last-mentioned place also seizing on part of the iron-clad fleet of Spain. The risings were suppressed, not without difficulty, by the national troops. The autonomists had a lingering existence till 1879.