The development and the extension of the bourgeois system have been rapid and colossal in these last fifty years. It already invades sacred and ancient Russia and it is creating, not only in America, Australia and in India, but even in Japan, new centers of modern production, thus complicating the conditions of competition and the entanglements of the world market. The consequences of political changes have been produced, or will not be long to wait for. Equally rapid and colossal has been the progress of the proletariat. Its political education takes each day a new step toward the conquest of political power. The rebellion of the productive forces against the form of production, the struggle of living labor against accumulated labor, becomes every day more evident. The bourgeois system is henceforth upon the defensive and it reveals its decadence by this singular contradiction; the peaceful world of industry has become a colossal camp in which militarism develops. The peaceful period of industry has become by the irony of things the period of the continuous invention of new engines of war. Socialism has forced itself into the situation. Those semi-socialists, even those charlatans who encumber with their presence the press and the meetings of our party and who often are a nuisance to us, are a tribute which vanity and ambitions of every sort render in their fashion to the new power which rises on the horizon. In spite of the foreseen antidote which scientific socialism is, the truth of which many people have not come to understand, there is a group of quacks on the social question, all having some particular specific to eliminate such or such a social evil: land nationalization, monopoly of grains in the hands of the State, democratic taxes, statization of mortgages, general strike, etc. But social democracy eliminates all these fantasies because the consciousness of their situation leads the proletarians when once they have become familiar with the political arena to understand socialism in an integral fashion. They come to understand that they should look for only one thing, the abolition of wage labor; that there is but one form of society which renders possible and even necessary the elimination of classes,--the association which does not produce commodities, and that this form of society is no longer the State, but its opposite, that is to say, the technical and pedagogical administration of human society, the self-government of labor. Behind the Jacobins are the gigantic heroes of 1793 and their caricatures of 1848. _Social democracy!_ But is not that, say some, an evident attenuation of the communist doctrine as it is formulated in the Manifesto in terms so ringing and so decisive?