to, Brutus, Cicero;
Caesar, more popular than he, has as his followers only
degenerates--Antony, a libertine and drunkard; Curio, a bankrupt;
Clelius, a madman; Dolabella, who made his wife die of grief and who
wanted to annul all debts; and, above all, Catiline and Clodius. In
Greece the Clefts, who are brigands in time of peace, have valiantly
championed the independence of their country. In Italy, in 1860, the
Papacy and the Bourbons hired brigands to oppose the national party and
its troops; the Mafia of Sicily rose up with Garibaldi; and the Camorra
of Naples cooeperated with the liberals. And this shameful alliance with
the Camorra of Naples is not yet dissolved; the last parliamentary
struggles relative to the acts of the government of Naples have given us
a sad echo of it--which, alas, proves that it still lasts without hope
of change for the future. It is especially at the initial stages of
revolutions that these sorts of people abound. It is then, indeed, that
the abnormal and unhealthy spirits predominate over the faltering and
the weak and drag them on to excesses by an actual epidemic of
imitation."[21]

Marx and Engels saw very clearly the part that the criminal elements
would play in any uprising, and as early as 1847 they wrote in the
Communist Manifesto: "The 'dangerous class,' the social scum, that
passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society,
may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian
revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for
the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue."[22] The truth of
this statement has been amply illustrated in the numerous outbreaks that
have occurred since it was written. The use by the Bakouninists in Spain
of the criminal elements there, the repeated exploits of the police
agents in discrediting every uprising by encouraging the criminal
elements to outrageous acts, and the terrible barbarities of the
criminal classes at the time of the Paris Commune are all examples of
how useful to reaction the rotting layers of old society may become.
Even when they do not serve as a bribed tool of the reactionary
elements, their atrocities, both cruel and criminal, repel the
self-respecting and conscientious elements. They discredit the real
revolutionists, who must bear the stigma that attaches to the inhuman
acts of the "dangerous class."

That the European governments have used the terrorists in exactly th