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 208 he came in contact with the Socialist movement, such as it then was, and Proudhon became his companion.

But Proudhon was a Frenchman and belonged to the old generation of utopists. As he himself confessed towards his end, the greater part of his work consisted of unsystematised gropings after general laws and conceptions, and he inherited to the full the legacy of simple-minded optimism which the French Revolution left as a dowry to two generations of French social reformers and thinkers. And yet he had moved towards the border-line of the new epoch, for one of the points of disagreement between himself and the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier was that these latter believed too much in sudden transformations. But he had come to see in governments nothing but tyrannies, and thus he forbade himself from ever joining the ranks of the newer movement. It is not to be wondered at that he and the systematic Marx fell out, and it was two Germans, Marx and Engels, and not a German and a Frenchman, who opened the new volume of the history of the Socialist movement.

The preliminary preparation was complete. The economic theory of Socialism was becoming pretty clear, political means were being thrust upon the workers of both Great Britain and Germany, utopian communities had failed absolutely. Two things were required. The vague uncertainties of aim and means had to be swept aside, the moral inanities of some of the schools had to be suppressed, the mind of