mit an
organization with an entirely different program and policies to join it
in a body. Nevertheless, the General Council declared that the members
of the Alliance could affiliate themselves as individuals with the
various national sections. After considerable debate, Bakounin and his
followers decided to abandon the Alliance and to join the International.
Whether the Alliance was in fact abolished is still open to question,
but in any case Bakounin appeared in the International toward the end of
the sixties, to challenge all the theories of Marx and to offer, in
their stead, his own philosophy of universal revolution. Anarchism as
the end and terrorism as the means were thus injected into the
organization at its most formative period, when the laboring classes of
all Europe had just begun to write their program, evolve their
principles, and define their tactics. With great force and magnetism,
Bakounin undertook his war upon the General Council, and those who
recall the period will realize that nothing could have more nearly
expressed the occasional spirit of the masses--the very spirit that Marx
and Engels were endeavoring to change--than exactly the methods proposed
by Bakounin.

Whether it were better to move gradually and peacefully along what
seemed a never-ending road to emancipation or to begin the revolution at
once by insurrection and civil war--this was in reality the question
which, from that moment on, agitated the International. It had always
troubled more or less the earlier organizations of labor, and now, aided
by Bakounin's eloquence and fiery revolutionism, it became the great
bone of contention throughout Europe. The struggles in the International
between those who became known later as the anarchists and the
socialists remind one of certain Greek stories, in which the outstanding
figures seem to impersonate mighty forces, and it is not impossible that
one day they may serve as material for a social epic. We all know to-day
the interminable study that engages the theologians in their attempts to
describe the battles and schisms in the early Christian Church. And
there can be no doubt that, if socialism fulfills the purpose which its
advocates have in mind, these early struggles in its history will become
the object of endless research and commentary. The calumnies, the feuds,
the misunderstandings, the clashing of doctrines, the antagonism of the
ruling spirits, the plots and conspiracies, the vict