nd a prominent member of the
League, Marx consented, in 1847, to present to that organization his
views, and the result was the famous Communist Manifesto. Every
essential idea of modern socialism is contained in that brief
declaration. Unfortunately, however, outside of Germany, the Communist
League was an exotic organization that could make little use of such a
program. Its members were mostly exiles, who, by the very nature of
their position, were hopelessly out of things. Little groups, surrounded
by a foreign people, exiles are rarely able to affect the movement at
home or influence the national movement amid which they are thrust.
There is little, therefore, noteworthy about the Communist League. It
had, to be sure, gathered together a few able and energetic spirits, and
some of these in later years exercised considerable influence in the
International. But, as a rule, the groups of the Communist League were
little more than debating societies whose members were filled with
sentimental, visionary, and insurrectionary ideas. Marx himself finally
lost all patience with them, because he could not drive out of their
heads the idea that they could revolutionize the entire world by some
sudden dash and through the exercise of will power, personal sacrifice,
and heroic action. The Communist League, therefore, is memorable only
because it gave Marx and Engels an opportunity for issuing their
epoch-making Manifesto, that even to-day is read and reread by the
workers in all lands of the world. Translated into every language, it is
the one pamphlet that can be found in every country as a part of the
basic literature of socialism.

There are certain principles laid down in the Communist Manifesto which
time cannot affect, although the greater part of the document is now of
historic value only. The third section, for instance, is a critique of
the various types of socialism then existing in Europe, and this part
can hardly be understood to-day by those unacquainted with those
sectarian movements. It deals with Reactionary Socialism, Feudal
Socialism, Clerical Socialism, Petty Bourgeois Socialism, German
Socialism, Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism, Critical-Utopian
Socialism, and Communism. The mere enumeration of these types of
socialist doctrine indicates what a chaos of doctrine and theory then
existed, and it was in order to distinguish themselves from these
various schools that Marx and Engels took the name of communist