They took up the tradition of Proudhon, who said that "the true form of the State is anarchy," meaning by anarchy, of course, not positive disorder, but the absence of any supreme ruler, whether king or convention. They would have property possessed and industry pursued on a communistic principle by groups or associations of workmen, but these groups must form themselves freely and voluntarily, without any social or political compulsion. The Marxists declared that this was simply a retention of the system of free competition in an aggravated form, that it would only lead to confusion worse confounded, and that the Bakunists, even in trying to abolish the evils of _laissez-faire_, were still foolishly supposing that the world could go of itself. This division of opinion--really a broader one than that which parts socialist from orthodox economist--rent the already enfeebled International into two separate organizations, which languished for a year or two and passed away. And so, with high thoughts of spreading a reign of fraternity over the earth, the International Working Men's Association perished, because, being only human, it could not maintain fraternity in its own narrow borders. This is a history that repeats itself again and again in socialist movements. As W. Marr said in the remark quoted above, revolutionists will only unite on a negation; the moment they begin to ask what they will put in its place they differ and dispute and come to nought. Apprehend them, close their meetings, banish their leaders, and you but knit them by common suffering to common resistance. You supply them with a negation of engrossing interest, you preoccupy their minds with a negative programme which keeps them united, and so you prevent them from raising the fatal question--What next? which they never discuss without breaking up into rival sects and factions, fraternal often in nothing but their hatred. "It is the shades that hate one another, not the colours." Such disruptions and secessions may--as they did in Germany--by emulation increase for a time the efficiency of the organization as a propagandist agency, but they certainly diminish its danger as a possible instrument of insurrection. A socialist organization seems always to contain two elements of internal disintegration. One is the prevalence of a singular and almost pathetic mistrust of their leaders, and of one another. The law of suspects is always in force among themselves. At meetings of the German Socialists, Liebknecht denounces Schweitzer as an agent of the Prussian Government, Schweitzer accuses Liebknecht of being an Austrian spy, and the frequent hints at bribery, and open charges of treason against the labourers' cause, disclose to us now duller and now more acute phases of that unhappy state of mutual suspicion, in which the one supreme, superhuman virtue, worthy to be worshipped, if haply it could anywhere be discovered, is the virtue men honoured even in Robespierre--the