Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/148

 Rh the Commune, are the most active, intelligent, and energetic minds of the International Workingmen's Association; … men who are thoroughly honest, sincere, intelligent, devoted, pure, and fanatical in the good sense of the word." The police-tinged bourgeois mind naturally figures to itself the International Workingmen's Association as acting in the manner of a secret conspiracy, its central body ordering, from time to time, explosions in different countries. Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between the most advanced workingmen in the various countries of the civilized world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any constituency, it is but natural that members of our Association should stand in the foreground. The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out, the Government would have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labor—the condition of their own parasitical existence.

Workingmen's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators, history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.