What was this mire? If we will cast our eyes back to the middle of last century we cannot but realize that the ideas of the world have undergone a complete revolution. When Marx began his work with the labor movement there was absolute ignorance among both masters and men concerning the nature of capitalism. It was a great and terrible enigma which no one understood. The working class itself was broken up into innumerable guerilla bands fighting hopelessly, aimlessly, with the most antiquated and ineffectual weapons. They were in misery; but why, they knew not. They left their work to riot for days and weeks, without aim and without purpose. They were bitter and sullen. They smashed machines and burned factories, chiefly because they were totally ignorant of the causes of their misery or of the nature of their real antagonist. Not seldom in those days there were meetings of hundreds of thousands of laborers, and not infrequently mysterious epidemics of fires and of machine-breaking occurred throughout all the factory districts. Again and again the soldiers were brought out to massacre the laborers. In all England--then the most advanced industrially--there were few who understood capitalism, and among masters or men there was hardly one who knew the real source of all the immense, intolerable economic evils. The class struggle was there, and it was being fought more furiously and violently than ever before or since. The most striking rebels of the time were those that Marx called the "bourgeois democrats." They were forever preaching open and violent revolution. They were dreaming of the glorious day when, amid insurrection and riot, they should stand at the barricades, fighting the battle for freedom. In their little circles they "were laying plans for the overthrow of the world and intoxicating themselves day by day, evening by evening, with the hasheesh-drink of: 'To-morrow it will start;'"[3] Before and after the revolutionary period of '48 there were innumerable thousands of these fugitives, exiles, and men of action obsessed with the dream that a great revolutionary cataclysm was soon to occur which would lay in ruins the old society. That a crisis was impending everyone believed, including even Marx and Engels. In fact, for over twenty years, from 1847 to 1871, the "extemporizers of revolutions" fretfully awaited the supreme hour. Toward the end of the period appeared Bakounin and Nechayeff with their robber worship, conspiratory secret societies, and international network of revolutionists. Wherever capitalism made headway the workers grew more and more rebellious, but neither they nor those who sought to lead them, and often did, in fact, lead them, had much of any program beyond destruction. Bakounin was not far wrong, at the time, in thinking that he was "spreading among the masses ideas corresponding to the instincts of the masses,"[4] when he advocated the destruction of the Government,