_The Communist League_ grew out of the _League of the Just_; the latter in its turn had been formed with a clear consciousness of its proletarian aims through a gradual specialization of the generic group of the refugees, the exiles. As a type, bearing within itself in an embryonic design the form of all the later socialist and proletarian movements, it had traversed the different phases of conspiracy and of equalitarian socialism. It was metaphysical with Gruen and utopian with Weitling. Having its principal seat at London it was interested in the Chartist movement and had had some influence over it. This movement showed by its disordered character, because it was neither the fruit of a premeditated experience, nor the embodiment of a conspiracy or of a sect, how painful and difficult was the formation of a proletarian political party. The socialist tendency was not manifested in Chartism until the movement was near its end and was nearly finished (though Jones and Horner can never be forgotten). The _League_ everywhere carried an odor of revolution, both because the thing was in the air and because its instinct and method of procedure tended that way: and as long as the revolution was bursting forth effectively, it provided itself, thanks to the new doctrine of the Manifesto, with an instrument of orientation which was at the same time a weapon for combat. In fact, already international, both by the quality and differences of origin of its members, and still more by the result of the instinct and devotion of all, it took its place in the general movement of political life as the clear and definite precursor of all that can to-day be called modern socialism, if by modern we mean not the simple fact of extrinsic chronology but an index of the internal or organic process of society.