In fact, Bakounine has no longer that immutable faith in the genius of the "master" Proudhon, which Tolain seems to have preserved intact. According to Bakounine "Proudhon, in spite of all his efforts to get a foothold upon the firm ground of reality, remained an idealist and metaphysician. His starting point is the abstract side of law; it is from this that he starts in order to arrive at economic facts, while Marx, on the contrary, has enunciated and proved the truth, demonstrated by the whole of the ancient and modern history of human societies, of peoples and of states, that economic facts preceded and precede the facts of political and civil law. The discovery and demonstration of this truth is one of the greatest merits of M. Marx."[36] In another of his writings he says, with entire conviction, "All the religions, and all the systems of morals that govern a given society are always the ideal expression of its real, material condition, that is, especially of its economic organisation, but also of its political organisation, the latter, indeed, being never anything but the juridical and violent consecration of the former." And he again mentions Marx as the man to whom belongs the merit of having discovered and demonstrated this truth.[37] One asks oneself with astonishment how this same Bakounine could declare that private property was only a consequence of the principle of authority. The solution of the riddle lies in the fact that he did not understand the materialist conception of history; he was only "adulterated" by it. And here is a striking proof of this. In the Russian work, already quoted, "Statism and Anarchy," he says that in the situation of the Russian people there are two elements which constitute the conditions necessary for the social (he means Socialist) revolution. "The Russian people can boast of excessive poverty, and unparalleled slavery. Their sufferings are innumerable, and they bear these, not with patience, but with a profound and passionate despair, that twice already in our history has manifested itself in terrible outbursts: in the revolt of Stephan Razine, and in that of Pougatschew."[38] And that is what Bakounine understood by the material conditions of a Socialist revolution! Is it necessary to point out that this "Marxism" is a little too _sui generis_? While combating Mazzini from the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, Bakounine himself is so far from understanding the true import of this conception, that in the same work in which he refutes the Mazzinian theology, he speaks, like the thorough-faced Proudhonian that he is, of "absolute" human morality, and he bolsters up the idea of this morality--the morality of "solidarity,"--with such arguments as these: