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192 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
feared from his faction, segregated and limited to certain
places in the Latin countries; but everywhere the
name of the International was being used by all sorts of
elements that could only injure the actual labor movement.
The exploits of Nechayeff, of Bakounin, and of
certain Spanish and Italian sections had all conveyed
to the world an impression of the International which
perhaps could never be altogether erased. Furthermore,
in Germany and other countries the seeds of an actual
working-class political movement had been planted, and
there was already promise of a huge development in the
national organizations. What moved Marx thus to destroy
his own child, the concrete thing he had dreamed
of in his thirty years of incessant labor, profound study,
and ceaseless agitation, will perhaps never be fully
known, but in any
case no act of Marx was ever of
greater service to the cause of labor. It was a form of
surgery that cut out of the socialist movement forever
an irreconcilable element, and from then on the distinction
between anarchist and socialist was indisputably
clear. They stood poles apart, and everyone realized
that no useful purpose would be served in trying to bring
them together again.
Largely because of Bakounin, the International as an
organization of labor never played an important role;
but, as a melting pot in which the crude ideas of many
philosophies were thrown—some to be fused, others to
be cast aside, and all eventually to be clarified and purified—
the International performed a memorable service.
During its entire life it was a battlefield. In the beginning
there were many separate groups, but at the end
there were only two forces in combat—socialists and
anarchists. When the quarrel began there was among
the masses no sharply dividing line ; their ideas were in-