Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/41

xxxiv he made of his immense patronage—extending directly over the Post Office, the Customs, the national monopoly of tobacco manufacture and retailing, and indirectly (as a "participant ") over all the public services—his performances are known to the world. And we dare say that no bourgeois minister can show a blacker record of duplicity, pretense, cunning and heartlessness in his treatment of the wage-working class. As it was on the shoulders of the proletariat that he climbed to power, it is well, perhaps, that he proved himself the worst deceiver that could, by any possibility, have "accepted" or assumed to represent it in a bourgeois government. For it was a valuable experience, which Marx had certainly not in his prophetic mind when he wrote the "Longuet epigraph," but which it now appears that the present generation of workingmen had still to pass through, notwithstanding the terrible lessons transmitted to it by its predecessor of thirty years ago.

It also goes without saying that the Non Possumus of the Paris Congress struck its International Bureau with impotency. The Second International is not a mere aspiration; it is an absolute necessity, more strongly imposed every day by the economic, social and political developments. It must and shall be organized; and it will then be a mighty power. But, first of all, the union of the social-revolutionary forces must be accomplished in all the leading countries, as it has been in France and in the United States.

In conclusion, it is in the light of all the facts above stated or referred to, that the International's Manifesto on the Paris Commune and the Paris Congress's Kautsky resolution must be read and compared. In that light is best seen what they truly are: one an act of sublime fortitude and unconquerable determination on the day