Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/112

86 privileges it is necessary to do away with the inheritance of property, to secure equal rights for women, this involving the abolition of the patria potestas and of marriage; to maintain children until they reach full age, and to secure for them at the hands of a free society an education which shall make them equally competent for "muscular" and "nervous" work.

In ultimate analysis the basis of economic organisation must rest on the two principles, that the land is the property of those who till it, the property of the village communities, and that capital and all the instruments of production belong to the workers, are the property of workers' associations. The entire political organism is to be a free federation of agricultural and manufacturing associations (artels); the state is to be destroyed. The separate peoples in Russia may, should they so desire, unite to form a free federation, becoming members "of the Russian folk," and this will affiliate with the equall free societies of Europe and the entire world.

. Important for the further development of secret revolutionary propaganda was the Society of the People's Assize, a secret society founded by Nečaev in 1869. Nečaev, Bakunin's disciple, secured widespread notoriety through his Catechism of Revolution. This work was an introduction to conspiracy and to propaganda by deed, and presupposes the acceptance of Bakunin's program.

In the Catechism the arts of the secret conspirator are urged with consummate Jesuitry, this word Jesuitry being understood in its most evil connotation as political Machiavellianism. The members of the secret society have to obey their leader absolutely, and for the most part remain unknown one to another; the revolutionary conspirator must be a blind instrument, must abandon all personal interests and sentiments, must break every family tie and must give up even his name, to devote his whole individuality to the life and death struggle; the genuine revolutionist abandons all romanticism, even hatred and personal feelings of revenge being subordinated to