Certainly, Kirkup is not far from the true Socialist ideal when he asserts (“History of Socialism,” p. 160), that “a great revolutionary catastrophe is to close the capitalistic era”; even though he adds, “this must be regarded as a very bad preparation for the time of social peace which is forthwith to follow.” It is not easy for Socialists to evade this issue, especially in view of the fact that the instructions they have received from their leaders so invariably tend to incite violence. “If the people have not a scrapnel to shoot, they have broken bottles to throw,” said Victor Grayson at Huddersfield, on August 12, 1907. “Chemistry,” says Hyndman (“Historical Basis of Socialism,” p. 443), “has placed at the disposal of the desperate and the needy cheap and powerful explosives, the full effects of which are as yet unknown. Every day adds new discoveries in this field; the dynamite of ideas is accompanied in the background by the dynamite of material force. These modern explosives may easily prove to capitalism what gunpowder was to feudalism.” If there remained any doubt as to the precise purposes of Socialism, the attitude which its press and its speakers assume toward the use of violence during the French Revolution and the Paris Commune would afford evidence in plenty. Marx lauded the uprising of 1871 and praised its bloodthirsty crimes as the work of heroes. “Workingmen’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society,” he said, in “The Civil War in France” (p. 78); and there is practically no end to the quotations that might be presented from the writings of Socialists who support Marx’s position. Herron refers to the Commune as “a sort of glad and beatific moment, a momentary and prophetic spring-time in the long procession of the changing forms of parasitism and hypocrisy and brute force which we know as law and government” (_Boston Address_, 1903). Quelch, too, in _Justice_ (London, March 18, 1911), signalizes the Paris Commune as “a glorious event, which should ever be borne in mind and celebrated by the proletariat of all civilized countries,” while the _Appeal to Reason_, when asked why American Socialists celebrated the anniversary of the Commune, replied (August 29, 1893): “Because it represented a rise of the working class and served as a splendid example of what working men can accomplish.” And this glorious event, this “glad and beatific moment,” is thus described by Mazzini, the Italian patriot: “A people was wallowing about as if drunk, raging against itself and lacerating its limbs with its teeth, while howling triumphant cries, dancing an infernal dance before the grave which it had dug with its own hand, killing, torturing, burning and committing crimes without sense, shame or hope. It put one in mind of the most horrid visions of Dante’s Hell.”