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4 6 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
Bakounin wrote to the Jura Federation, announcing his
retreat from public life and requesting
it to accept his
resignation. "For acting in this way," he wrote, "I have
many reasons. Do not believe that it is principally on
account of the personal attacks of which I have been
made the object these last years. I do not say that I am
absolutely insensible to such. However, I would feel
myself strong enough to resist them if I thought that my
further participation in your work and in your struggles
by my sympathies and my tendencies, I
could aid in the triumph of the cause of the proletariat.
But I do not think so.
"By my birth and my personal position, and doubtless
am only a bourgeois,
and, as such, I could not do anything else among
you but propaganda. Well, I have a conviction that the
time for great theoretical discourses, whether printed or
spoken, is past. In the last nine years there have been
developed within the International more ideas than would
be necessary to save the world, if ideas alone could save
it, and I defy anybody to invent a new one." (28)
This letter in reality marks the end of Bakounin's activity
in the revolutionary movement. After squandering
most of Cafiero's fortune, Bakounin sought a martyr's
death in Italy, but in this, as in all his other exploits, he
was unsuccessful. And from that time on to his death
his life is a humiliating story as he sought here and there
the necessary money for his livelihood. Nearly always
he had been forced to live from hand to mouth. Money,
was the burden of hundreds of his let-
money, money
ters. In order to obtain funds he had resorted to almost
every possible plan.
He had accepted money in advance
from publishers for books which he had never had time
to write. From time to time he would find an almoner to
care for him, only in the end to lose him through his