ing to reply to their infamous
calumnies by a good little book in which I shall give everything and
everybody its proper name. I leave this country with deep despair in my
heart."[23] He then set to work at last to state systematically his own
views and to annihilate utterly those of the socialists. Many of these
documents are only fragmentary. Some were started and abandoned; others
ended in hopeless confusion. With the most extraordinary gift of
inspirited statement, he passes in review every phase of history,
leaping from one peak to another of the great periods, pointing his
lessons, issuing his warnings, but all the time throwing at the reader
such a Niagara of ideas and arguments that he is left utterly dazed and
bewildered as by some startling military display or the rushing here and
there of a military maneuver. In _Lettres a un Francais_; _Manuscrit de
114 Pages, ecrit a Marseille_; _Lettre a Esquiros_; _Preambule pour la
Seconde Livraison de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_; _Avertissement pour
l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_; _Au Journal La Liberte, de Bruxelles_; and
_Fragment formant une Suite de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_, he returns
again and again to the charge, always seeking to deal some fatal blow to
Marxian socialism, but never apparently satisfying himself that he has
accomplished his task. He touches the border of practical criticism of
the socialist program in the fragment entitled _Lettres a un Francais_.
It ends, however, before the task is done. Again he takes it up in the
_Manuscrit ecrit a Marseille_. But here also, as soon as he arrives at
the point of annihilating the socialists, his task is discontinued. In
truth, he himself seems to have realized the inconclusive character of
his writings, as he refused in some cases to complete them and in other
cases to publish them. Nevertheless, we find in various places of his
fragmentary writings not only a statement of his own views, but his
entire critique upon socialism.

As I have made clear enough, I think, in my first chapter, there are in
Bakounin's writings two main ideas put forward again and again, dressed
in innumerable forms and supported by an inexhaustible variety of
arguments. These ideas are based upon his antagonism to religion and to
government. It was always _Dieu et l'Etat_ that he was fighting, and not
until both the ideas and the institutions which had grown up in support
of "these monstrous oppressions" had been destroyed and swept fro