ric field within which it is born, which was that of France,
England and Germany. Its field for propaganda and diffusion has since
become wider and wider, and it is henceforth as vast as the civilized
world. In all countries in which the tendency to communism has developed
through antagonisms under aspects different but every day more evident
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the process of its first
formation is wholly or partly repeated over and over. The proletarian
parties which are formed little by little have traversed anew the stages
of formation which their precursors traversed at first; but this process
has become from country to country and from year to year always more
rapid by reason of the greater evidence, the pressing necessity and
energy of the antagonisms, and because it is easier to assimilate a
doctrine and a tendency than to create both for the first time. Our
co-workers of 50 years ago were also from this point of view
international, since by their example they started the proletariat of
the different nations upon the general march which labor must
accomplish.

But the perfect theoretical knowledge of socialism to-day, as before,
and as it always will be, lies in the understanding of its historic
necessity, that is to say, in the consciousness of the manner of its
genesis; and this is precisely reflected, as in a limited field of
observation and in a hasty example, in the formation of the Manifesto.
It was intended for a weapon of war and thus it bears upon its own
exterior the traces of its origin. It contains more substantial
declarations than demonstrations. The demonstration rests entirely in
the imperative force of its necessity. But we may retrace the process of
this formation and to retrace it is to understand truly the doctrine of
the Manifesto. There is an analysis which while separating in theory the
factors of an organism destroys them in so far as they are elements
contributing to the unity of the whole. But there is another analysis,
and this alone permits us to understand history, which only
distinguishes and separates the elements to find again in them the
objective necessity of their co-operation toward the total result.

It is now a current opinion that modern socialism is a normal and thus
an inevitable product of history. Its political action, which may in
future involve delays and set-backs but never henceforth a total
absorption, began with the _International_. Nev