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 and agitation to this fact, as, indeed, to the whole question of federal and centralized republics and local self-government.

In his preface to the third edition of the Civil War in France (this preface is dated March 18, 1891, and was originally published in the Neue Zeit), Engels, side by side with many other interesting items with regard to the State, gives a remarkably striking resume of the lessons of the Commune. This resume, confirmed by all the experience of the period of twenty years separating the author from the Commune, and directed particularly against the "superstitious faith in the State" so widely diffused in Germany, can, quite justly, be called the last word of Marxism on the question here dealt with.

In France, Engels notes the workers were armed after every revolution. "Consequently the first commandment for every bourgeois at the head of the State was the disarmament of the workers. Accordingly, after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle arose which ended with their defeat. …"

This is a summing up of the experience of bourgeois revolutions which is as short as it is expressive. The essence of the whole matter—also, by the way, of the question of the State, viz., has the oppressed class arms?—is here wonderfully well expressed. It is just this essential thing which, more often than not, is ignored by both professors under the influence of capitalist ideology and by the lower middle class democrats. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, it was to the "Menshevik," a so-called "Marxist" Tseretelli, that the Cavaignac honor fell of babbling out this secret of bourgeois revolutions. In his "historic" speech of June 9, Tseretelli blundered out the decision of: the bourgeoisie to disarm the Petrograd workers—referring, of course, to this decision as his own, and as a vital necessity for the State.

Tseretelli's historic speech of June 9 (22nd), will certainly constitute for every historian of the Revolution of 1917, one of the clearest illustrations of how the bloc of Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, led by Mr. Tseretelli, went over to the side of the capitalist class against the revolutionary proletariat.

Another incidental remark of Engels' also connected with the question of the State dealt with religion. It is well-known that the German Social-Democracy, in proportion as it began to decay and to become more and more opportunistic, slid down more and more frequently to the philistine misinterpretation of the celebrated formula that "religion is a private matter." That is,