needed to have the whole population first thoroughly leavened with its principles; nay, it needed to possess an international character, depending not on detached local outbreaks, but on steady concert in revolutionary action on the part of the labouring classes everywhere. The cause was not political, or even national, but social; and society--which was indeed already pregnant with the change--must be aroused to a conscious consent to the delivery. What was first to be done, therefore, was to educate and move public opinion, and in this work the ordinary secret society went but a little way. A secret propaganda might still be carried on, but a public and open propaganda was more effectual and more suitable to the times. There never existed greater facilities for such a movement, and they ought to make use of all the abundant means of popular agitation and intercommunication which modern society allowed. No more secret societies in holes and corners, no more small risings and petty plots, but a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen to stir the masses of all European countries to a common international revolution. Marx sought, in short, to introduce the large system of production into the art of conspiracy. Finding his views well received by the Central Committee of the Communist League, he acceded to their request to attend their General Congress at London in 1847, and then, after several weeks of keen discussion, he prevailed upon the Congress to adopt "the Manifesto of the Communist party," which was composed by himself and Engels, and which was afterwards translated from the German into English, French, Danish, and Italian, and sown broadcast everywhere just before the Revolution of 1848. This Communist League may be said to be the first organization--and this Communist Manifesto the first public declaration--of the International Socialist Democracy that now is. The Manifesto begins by describing the revolutionary situation into which the course of industrial development has brought modern society. Classes were dying out; the yeomanry, the nobility, the small tradesmen, would soon be no more; and society was drawn up in two widely separated hostile camps, the large capitalist class or _bourgeoisie_, who had all the property and power in the country, and the labouring class, the proletariat, who had nothing of either. The _bourgeoisie_ had played a most revolutionary part in history. They had overturned feudalism, and now they had created proletarianism, which would soon swamp themselves. They had collected the masses in great towns; they had kept the course of industry in perpetual flux and insecurity by rapid successive transformations of the instruments and processes of production, and by continual recurrences of commercial crises; and while they had reduced all other classes to a proletariat, they had made the life of the proletariat one of privation, of uncertainty, of discontent, of