Thence come the incoherence and the inconsistency of the parties, the rapid oscillations from demagogy to dictatorship, the mob, the multitude, the infinite army of the parasites of politics, the makers of fantastic projects. This singular social spectacle of a development prevented, retarded, embarrassed and thus uncertain, is brought out in bold relief by a penetrating spirit which, if it is not always the fruit and the expression of a modern, broad and real culture nevertheless bears within itself as the relic of an excellent civilization the mark of great cerebral refinement. Italy has not been for reasons easy to guess a suitable field for the indigenous formation of socialist ideas and tendencies. The Italian Philippe Buonaroti, at first the friend of the younger Robespierre, become the companion of Babeuf and later attempted to re-establish Babeufism in France, after 1830. Socialism made its first appearance in Italy at the time of the International, in the confused and incoherent form of Bakuninism; it was not, moreover, a labor movement, but it was the work of the small bourgeois and instinctive revolutionists.[16] In these last years socialism has fixed itself in a form which _almost_ reproduces the general type of _social democracy_.[17] Now in Italy the first sign of life which the proletariat gave is in the shape of the rising of the Sicilian peasants followed by other revolts of the same kind on the continent to which others will perhaps succeed in the future. Is it not very significant? After this incursion into the history of contemporary socialism we gladly return to our precursors of fifty years ago, who put on record in the Manifesto how they took possession of an advance post on the road of progress. And that is true not merely of the theorizers, that is to say, Marx and Engels. Both of these men would have exercised, under other circumstances and at all times either by tongue or pen, a considerable influence over politics and science such was the force and originality of their minds and the extent of their knowledge even if they had never met on their way the _Communist League_. But I am referring to all the "unknown" according to the exclusive and vain jargon of bourgeois literature:--of the shoemaker, Bauer, the tailors, Lessner and Eccarius, the miniature painter, Pfaender, the watchmaker, Moll,[18] of Lochner, etc., and many others who were the first conscious initiators of our movement. The motto, "Workingmen of all countries, unite," remains as their monument. The passage of socialism from utopia to science marks the result of their work. The survival of their instinct and of their first impulse in the work of to-day is the ineffaceable title which these precursors have acquired to the gratitude of all socialists.