o that journal, it is
especially interesting because he attacks the General Council as a new
incarnation of the State. Here his lively imagination pictures the
International as the germ of a new despotic social order, already fallen
under the domination of a group of dictators, and he exclaims: "A State,
a government, a universal dictatorship! The dream of Gregory VII., of
Boniface VIII., of Charles V., and of Napoleon is reproduced in new
forms, but ever with the same pretensions, in the camp of social
democracy."[2] This is an altogether new point of view as to the
character of the State. We now learn that it means any form of
centralized organization; a committee, a chairman, an executive body of
any sort is a State. The General Council in London was a State. Marx and
Engels were a State. Any authority--no matter what its form, nor how
controlled, appointed, or elected--is a State.

I am not sure that this marks the birth of the repugnance of the
anarchists to even so innocent a form of authority as that of a
chairman. Nor am I certain that this was the origin of those ideas of
organization that make of an anarchist meeting a modern Babel, wherein
all seems to be utter confusion. In any case, the Bakouninists, after
The Hague congress, undertook to revive the International and to base
this new organization on these ideas of anarchism. After a conference at
Saint-Imier in the Jura, where Bakounin and his friends outlined the
policies of a new International, a call was sent out for a congress to
be held in Geneva in 1873. The congress that assembled there was not a
large one, but, with no exaggeration whatever, it was one of the most
remarkable gatherings ever held. For six entire days and nights the
delegates struggled to create by some magic means a world-wide
organization of the people, without a program, a committee, a chairman,
or a vote. No longer oppressed by the "tyranny" of Marx, or baffled by
his "abominable intrigues," they set out to create their "faithful
image" of the new world--an organization that was not to be an
organization; a union that was to be made up of fleeting and constantly
shifting elements, agreeing at one moment to unite, at the next moment
to divide. This was the insolvable problem that now faced the first
congress of the anarchists. There were only two heretics among them.
Both had come from England; but Hales was a "voice crying in the
wilderness," while Eccarius sat silent throughout t