t, aim and activity already formed the
International Workingmen's Association.

These are the beginnings of modern socialism. We find there the line
which separates it from all the rest.

_The Communist League_ grew out of the _League of the Just_; the latter
in its turn had been formed with a clear consciousness of its
proletarian aims through a gradual specialization of the generic group
of the refugees, the exiles. As a type, bearing within itself in an
embryonic design the form of all the later socialist and proletarian
movements, it had traversed the different phases of conspiracy and of
equalitarian socialism. It was metaphysical with Gruen and utopian with
Weitling. Having its principal seat at London it was interested in the
Chartist movement and had had some influence over it. This movement
showed by its disordered character, because it was neither the fruit of
a premeditated experience, nor the embodiment of a conspiracy or of a
sect, how painful and difficult was the formation of a proletarian
political party. The socialist tendency was not manifested in Chartism
until the movement was near its end and was nearly finished (though
Jones and Horner can never be forgotten). The _League_ everywhere
carried an odor of revolution, both because the thing was in the air and
because its instinct and method of procedure tended that way: and as
long as the revolution was bursting forth effectively, it provided
itself, thanks to the new doctrine of the Manifesto, with an instrument
of orientation which was at the same time a weapon for combat. In fact,
already international, both by the quality and differences of origin of
its members, and still more by the result of the instinct and devotion
of all, it took its place in the general movement of political life as
the clear and definite precursor of all that can to-day be called modern
socialism, if by modern we mean not the simple fact of extrinsic
chronology but an index of the internal or organic process of society.

A long interruption from 1852 to 1864 which was the period of political
reaction and at the same time that of the disappearance, the dispersion
and the absorption of the old socialist schools, separates the
International of the _Arbeiterbildungsverein_ of London, from the
International properly so called, which, from 1864 to 1873, strove to
put unity into the struggle of the proletariat of Europe and America.
The action of the proletariat had other inte