There is, of course, no possibility of adequately summarizing, in such limited space as I have allotted to it, the thought of one who traversed the history of the entire world of thought and action in pursuit of some crushing argument against the socialism of Marx. This perverted form of socialism, Bakounin maintained, contemplated the establishment of a _communisme autoritaire_, or State socialism. "The State," he says, "having become the sole owner--at the end of a certain period of transition which will be necessary in order to transform society, without too great economic and political shocks, from the present organization of bourgeois privilege to the future organization of official equality for all--the State will also be the sole capitalist, the banker, the money lender, the organizer, the director of all the national work, and the distributor of its products. Such is the ideal, the fundamental principle of modern communism."[24] This is, of all Bakounin's criticisms of socialism, the one that has had the greatest vitality. It has gone the round of the world as a crushing blow to socialist ideals. The same thought has been repeated by every politician, newspaper, and capitalist who has undertaken to refute socialism. And every socialist will admit that of all the attempts to misrepresent socialism and to make it abhorrent to most people the idea expressed in these words of Bakounin has been the most effective. To state thus the ideal of socialism is sufficient in most cases to end all argument. Add to this program military discipline for the masses, barracks for homes, and a ruling bureaucracy, and you have complete the terrifying picture that is held up to the workers of every country, even to-day, as the nefarious, world-destroying design of the socialists.