re 1848, were entirely forgotten; ideas
which were then current--the stock ideas of the Socialists before
1848--were so wiped out as to be taken, later on, by our generation, for
new discoveries.

However, when a new revival began, about 1866, when Communism and
Collectivism once more came forward, it appeared that the conception as
to the means of their realization had undergone a deep change. The old
faith in Political Democracy was dying out, and the first principles
upon which the Paris working-men agreed with the British trade-unionists
and Owenites, when they met in 1862 and 1864, at London, was that "the
emancipation of the working-men must be accomplished by the working-men
themselves." Upon another point they also were agreed. It was that the
labour unions themselves would have to get hold of the instruments of
production, and organize production themselves. The French idea of the
Fourierist and Mutualist "Association" thus joined hands with Robert
Owen's idea of "The Great Consolidated Trades' Union," which was
extended now, so as to become an International Working-men's
Association.

Again this new revival of Socialism lasted but a few years. Soon came
the war of 1870-71, the uprising of the Paris Commune--and again the
free development of Socialism was rendered impossible in France. But
while Germany accepted now from the hands of its German teachers, Marx
and Engels, the Socialism of the French "forty-eighters" that is, the
Socialism of Considerant and Louis Blanc, and the Collectivism of
Pecqueur,--France made a further step forward.

In March, 1871, Paris had proclaimed that henceforward it would not wait
for the retardatory portions of France: that it intended to start within
its Commune its own social development.

The movement was too short-lived to give any positive result. It
remained communalist only; it merely asserted the rights of the Commune
to its full autonomy. But the working-classes of the old International
saw at once its historical significance. They understood that the free
commune would be henceforth the medium in which the ideas of modern
Socialism may come to realization. The free agro-industrial communes, of
which so much was spoken in England and France before 1848, need not be
small phalansteries, or small communities of 2000 persons. They must be
vast agglomerations, like Paris, or, still better, small territories.
These communes would federate to constitute nations in some cas