incorruptible. The other source of disintegration is the tendency to intestine divisions on points of doctrine. A reconstruction of society is necessarily a most extensive programme, and allows room for the utmost variety of opinion and plan. The longer it is discussed, the more certainly do differences arise, and the movement becomes a strife of schools in no way formidable to the government. All this only furnishes another reason for the conclusion that in dealing with socialist agitations, a government's safest as well as justest policy is, as much as may be, to leave them alone. Their danger lies in the cloudiness of their ideas, and that can only be dispersed in the free breezes of popular discussion. The sword is an idle method of reasoning with an idea; an idea will eventually yield to nothing but argument. Repression, too, is absolutely impossible with modern facilities of inter-communication, and can at best but drive the offensive elements for a time into subterranean channels, where they gather like a dangerous choke-damp that may occasion at any moment a serious explosion. After the fall of the International, Marx took no further part in public movements, but occupied his time in completing his work _Das Capital_, under frequent interruption from ill-health, and he died in Paris in the spring of 1883, leaving that work still unfinished. The _Das Capital_ of Marx may be said to be the sacred book of contemporary socialism, and though, like other sacred books, it is probably a sealed one to the body of the faithful, for it is extremely stiff reading, it is the great source from which socialist agitators draw their inspiration and arguments. Apart from the representative authority with which it is thus invested, it must be at once acknowledged to be an able, learned, and important work, founded on diligent research, evincing careful elaboration of materials, much acuteness of logical analysis, and so much solicitude for precision that a special terminology has been invented to secure it. The author's taste for logical distinctions, however, as he has actually applied it, serves rather to darken than to elucidate his exposition. He overloads with analysis secondary points of his argument which are clear enough without it, and he assumes without analysis primary positions which it is most essential for him to make plain. His style and method carries us back to the ecclesiastical schoolmen. His superabounding love of scholastic formalities is unmodern; and one may be permitted to hope that the odium more than theological with which he speaks of opponents has become unmodern too.