the
impossible. It is necessary to recognize reality and to realize that,
for the moment, the popular masses do not wish socialism. And, if some
tipplers of the mountains desire on this account to accuse you of
treason, you will have for yourself the witness of your conscience and
the esteem of your friends."[27]

In July, 1873, Bakounin retired to an estate that had been bought for
him through the generosity of Cafiero, on the route from Locarno to
Bellinzona, and for the next few months lavish expenditures were made in
the construction and reconstruction of an establishment where the
"intimates" could be entertained. That fall Bakounin wrote to the Jura
Federation, announcing his retreat from public life and requesting it to
accept his resignation. "For acting in this way," he wrote, "I have many
reasons. Do not believe that it is principally on account of the
personal attacks of which I have been made the object these last years.
I do not say that I am absolutely insensible to such. However, I would
feel myself strong enough to resist them if I thought that my further
participation in your work and in your struggles could aid in the
triumph of the cause of the proletariat. But I do not think so.

"By my birth and my personal position, and doubtless by my sympathies
and my tendencies, I am only a bourgeois, and, as such, I could not do
anything else among you but propaganda. Well, I have a conviction that
the time for great theoretical discourses, whether printed or spoken, is
past. In the last nine years there have been developed within the
International more ideas than would be necessary to save the world, if
ideas alone could save it, and I defy anybody to invent a new one."[28]

This letter in reality marks the end of Bakounin's activity in the
revolutionary movement. After squandering most of Cafiero's fortune,
Bakounin sought a martyr's death in Italy, but in this, as in all his
other exploits, he was unsuccessful. And from that time on to his death
his life is a humiliating story as he sought here and there the
necessary money for his livelihood. Nearly always he had been forced to
live from hand to mouth. Money, money, money was the burden of hundreds
of his letters. In order to obtain funds he had resorted to almost every
possible plan. He had accepted money in advance from publishers for
books which he had never had time to write. From time to time he would
find an almoner to care for him, only in the end