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THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
forms in which that activity should express itself may be 
widely varied : poison, poignard, running noose. The revolu 
tion sanctifies all means without distinction.” These means 
will appear somewhat superannuated to-day, but ten years ago 
petroleum and dynamite did not yet occupy, in the revolution 
ary arsenal, the position now assured to them by their proved 
efficiency. To attain to “ pan-destruction,” the first requisite 
is “ a series of outrages and of audacious and even mad enter 
prises, striking terror into the powerful and arousing the people, 
till they believe in the triumph of the Revolution.” Does not 
this infernal programme seem like a hideous dream ?—and yet 
the various attempts at assassination which take place almost 
daily in Russia and elsewhere prove that it is being carried out 
to the letter. It is incomprehensible how this frightful work of 
pan-destruction can inspire persons belonging to the well-to-do 
classes with that savage fanaticism which leads them to sacrifice 
their own lives in order to kill those whom the Vehmgericht 
condemns to death. In the West, regicides are not wanting, 
and they act under the sway of this same hatred of the social 
order, but they have no accomplices, and the criminal idea 
springs from a sort of sickly fermentation in disordered brains : 
the two regicides of Berlin, the two of Madrid, and the one of 
Naples all displayed the same characteristics. In Russia the 
assassins are intelligent, well-informed, determined persons, and 
they act in obedience to a vast association which is everywhere 
present, but which, nevertheless, baffles the most persistent 
efforts of the police. There must be a force of mystical exalta 
tion in the Russian character which has disappeared elsewhere. 
To find a similar phenomenon, we must go back to the 
partisans of the “ Old Man of the Mountain,” in the thirteenth 
century. 
The organization of the party has not remained unknown ; 
it was formulated by Bakunin in the “ Revolutionary Cate 
chism,” written in cipher, but read by the public prosecutor at 
the trial of Netchaieff, on the 8th of July, 1871. The following 
are extracts from it :—“The revolutionist is a man under a vow. 
He ought to have no personal interests, no business, no feelings, 
no property. He ought to be entirely absorbed in one single