probably the most made-up mind in the council; he governed without reigning; and, with his faithful German following, he exercised an almost paramount influence on its action from first to last, in spite of occasional revolts and intrigues against an authority which democratic jealousy resented as dictatorial, or--worse still--monarchical. The statutes of the association, which were adopted at the Geneva Congress of 1866, declared that "the economic subjection of the labourer to the possessor of the means of labour, _i.e._ of the sources of life, is the first cause of his political, moral, and material servitude, and that the economic emancipation of labour is consequently the great aim to which every political movement ought to be subordinated." Now no doubt the "economic emancipation of labour" meant different things to different sections of the Association's members. To the English trades unionists it meant practically better wages; to the Russian nihilists it meant the downfall of the Czar and of all central political authority, and leaving the socialistic communal organization of their country to manage itself without interference from above; to some of the French members (as appeared at the Lausanne Congress in 1867) it meant the nationalization of credit and all land except that held by peasant proprietors, a class which it was necessary to maintain as a counterpoise to the State; while, to the German socialists, it meant the abolition of wages, the nationalization of land and the instruments of production, the assumption by the State of a supreme direction of all trade, commerce, finance, and agriculture, and the distribution by the State of land, tools, and materials to guilds and productive associations as the actual industrial executive. There were thus very different elements in the composition of the International, but a _modus vivendi_ was found for some years by nursing an ultimate ideal, which was desirable, and meanwhile practically working for a proximate and much narrower ideal, which was more immediately feasible or necessary. The association could thus hold that nothing could benefit the working class but an abolition of wages, and could yet, as it sometimes did, help and encourage strikes which wanted only to raise wages. At its Congress in Brussels in 1868 it declared that a strike was not a means of completely emancipating the labourers, but was often a necessity in the present situation of labour and capital. Most of the other practical measures to which the association addressed itself--the eight hours normal day of labour, gratuitous education, gratuitous justice, universal suffrage, abolition of standing armies, abolition of indirect taxes, prohibition of children's labour, State credit for productive associations--contemplated modifications of the existing system of things, but always contemplated them as aids to and instalments of the coming transformation of that system. The consciousness was constantly