ggle for equality, which,
of course, appeared to them as a regrettable and most dangerous episode
in the great Revolution. Yet, despite that fact, this early struggle for
economic equality had never been wholly forgotten. Besides, there were
Fourier and Saint-Simon, who, with very great scholarly attainments, had
rigidly analyzed existing society, exposed its endless disorders, and
advocated an entire social transformation. There were also Considerant,
Leroux, Vidal, Pecqueur, and Cabet. All of these able and gifted men had
kept the social question ever to the front, while Louis Blanc and
Blanqui had actually introduced into politics the principles of
socialism. Blanqui was an amazing character. He was an incurable,
habitual insurrectionist, who came to be called _l'enferme_ because so
much of his life was spent in prison.[Q] The authorities again and again
released him, only to hear the next instant that he was leading a mob to
storm the citadels of the Government. His life was a series of
unsuccessful assaults upon authority, launched in the hope that, if the
working class should once install itself in power, it would reorganize
society on socialist lines. He was a man of the street, who had only to
appear to find an army of thousands ready to follow him. Blanqui used to
say--according to Kropotkin--that there were in Paris fifty thousand men
ready at any moment for an insurrection. Again and again he arose like
an apparition among them, and on one occasion, at the head of two
hundred thousand people, he offered the dictatorship of France to Louis
Blanc. The latter was an altogether different person. His stage was the
parliamentary one. He was a powerful orator, who, throughout the
forties, was preaching his practical program of social reform--the right
to work, the organization of labor, and the final extinction of
capitalism by the growth of cooeperative production fostered by the
State. In 1848 he played a great role, and all Europe listened with
astonishment to the revolutionary proposals of this man who, for a few
months, occupied the most powerful position in France. At the same time
Proudhon was developing the principles of anarchism and earning
everlasting fame as the father of that philosophy. In truth, the whole
gamut of socialist ideas and the entire range of socialist methods had
been agitated and debated in peace and in war for half a century in
France.

In England the same questions had disturbed all cla