time of the International, in
the confused and incoherent form of Bakuninism; it was not, moreover, a
labor movement, but it was the work of the small bourgeois and
instinctive revolutionists.[16] In these last years socialism has fixed
itself in a form which _almost_ reproduces the general type of _social
democracy_.[17] Now in Italy the first sign of life which the
proletariat gave is in the shape of the rising of the Sicilian peasants
followed by other revolts of the same kind on the continent to which
others will perhaps succeed in the future. Is it not very significant?

After this incursion into the history of contemporary socialism we
gladly return to our precursors of fifty years ago, who put on record in
the Manifesto how they took possession of an advance post on the road of
progress. And that is true not merely of the theorizers, that is to say,
Marx and Engels. Both of these men would have exercised, under other
circumstances and at all times either by tongue or pen, a considerable
influence over politics and science such was the force and originality
of their minds and the extent of their knowledge even if they had never
met on their way the _Communist League_. But I am referring to all the
"unknown" according to the exclusive and vain jargon of bourgeois
literature:--of the shoemaker, Bauer, the tailors, Lessner and Eccarius,
the miniature painter, Pfaender, the watchmaker, Moll,[18] of Lochner,
etc., and many others who were the first conscious initiators of our
movement. The motto, "Workingmen of all countries, unite," remains as
their monument. The passage of socialism from utopia to science marks
the result of their work. The survival of their instinct and of their
first impulse in the work of to-day is the ineffaceable title which
these precursors have acquired to the gratitude of all socialists.

As an Italian, I return so much the more willingly to these beginnings
of modern socialism because for me, at least, this recent warning of
Engels' is not without importance. "Thus the discovery that everywhere
and always political conditions and events find their explanation in
economic conditions would not have been made by Marx in 1845, but rather
by Loria in 1886. He has at least succeeded in impressing this belief
upon his compatriots, and since his book has appeared in French even
upon some Frenchmen and he may now go on inflated with pride and vanity
as if he had discovered an epoch-making historic th