"4. Reduction of working hours--its end, bearing, and moral consequences; obligation of labor for all. "5. Association--its principle, its application; co-operation as distinguished from association proper. "6. Relation of capital and labor; foreign competition; commercial treaties. "7. Direct and indirect taxes. "8. International institutions--mutual credit, paper money, weights, measures, coins, and language. "9. Necessity of abolishing the Russian influence in Europe by the application of the principle of the right of the people to govern themselves; and the reconstitution of Poland upon a democratic and social basis. "10. Standing armies and their relation to production. "11. Religious ideas--their influence upon the social, political, and intellectual movements. "12. Establishment of a society for mutual help; aid, moral and material, given to the orphans of the association." This reads more like the agenda of a sophomore debating society than the outline of work for an international congress of workingmen. The discussions of the congress were desultory, quite impractical, and often tinged with the factional spirit that ultimately ruptured the association. At its first meeting the discussion of the eight-hour day, the limitation of work for women and children, and the establishing of better free schools took a modern turn. But the French delegates brought forward a proposal to confine the membership in the association to "hand workers." This was to get rid of Marx and Engels, who were "brain workers." Socialism was evidently no more clearly defined then than it is to-day. Occasionally practical subjects were debated, as the acquiring by the state of all the means of transportation, of mines, forests, and land. But their time was largely taken up in the discussion of general principles, such as "Labor must have its full rights and entire rewards." Or they resolved, as at Brussels in 1868, that producers could gain control of machines and factories only through an indefinite extension of co-operative societies and a system of mutual credit; or, as at Basle the following year, that society had a right to abolish private property in land. It is apparent to any one who reads the reports of their meetings that very little practical advance had been made since the "Manifesto." Socialism was still in the vapor of speculation. It had absorbed some practical aspects from the English unions. These were at first interested in the International, and at their national conference in Sheffield, 1868, they even urged the local unions to join it. This interest waned rapidly as they saw the Continental contingent veer towards the Commune.