Federation of the working classes of Europe, not in the sense in which some future historian will summarize two or three centuries (in which sense they may prove right enough), but as an immediate practical plan of action likely to be carried through in twenty years by Socialist societies holding completely and disdainfully aloof from ordinary politics. In short, they were romantic amateurs, and, as such, were enormously encouraged and flattered when Marx and Engels insisted on the “scientific” character of their movement in contrast to the “Utopian” Socialism of Owen, Fourier, St. Simon, and the men of the 1820-48 phase. When the events of 1871 in Paris tested them practically, their hopeless public incapacity forced their opponents to exterminate them in the most appalling massacre of modern times--all the more ghastly because it was a massacre of the innocents. Public opinion in Europe was reconciled to the massacre by the usual process of slandering the victims. Now had Europe been politically educated no slanders would have been necessary; for even had it been humanly possible that all the Federals mown down with mitrailleuses in Paris were incendiaries and assassins, it would still have been questionable whether indiscriminate massacre is the right way to deal with incendiaries and assassins. But there can be no question as to what must be done with totally incompetent governors. The one thing that is politically certain nowadays is that if a body of men upset the existing government of a modern state without sufficient knowledge and capacity to continue the necessary and honest part of its work, and if, being unable to do that work themselves, they will not let anyone else do it either, their extermination becomes a matter of immediate necessity. It will avail them nothing that they aim higher than their fathers did; that their intentions are good, their action personally disinterested, and their opponents selfish and venal routineers who would themselves be equally at a loss if they had to create a new order instead of merely pulling the wires of an old one. Anyone who looks at the portraits of the members of the Paris Commune can see at a glance that they compared very favorably in all the external signs of amiability and refinement with any governing body then or now in power in Europe. But they could not manage the business they took upon themselves; and Thiers could. Marx’s demonstration that they were heroes and martyrs and that Thiers and his allies were rascals did not help in the least, though it was undeniably the ablest document in the conflict of moral clap-trap that obscured the real issues--so able indeed as a piece of literature, that more than thirty years after its publication it struck down the Marquis de Gallifet as if it had appeared in the _Temps_ or _Débats_ of the day before. It was amiable of the Federals to be so much less capable of exterminating Thiers than