requisite to carry it on to the goal. Kropotkin, therefore, in contradistinction to Bakunin, does not desire to have any secret revolutionary organisations. The mass revolution must be the outcome of the deliberate agreement of all.
The revolution will be assured of success when the social class against which the struggle is being carried on shall have been brought to recognise the validity of the new ideals of the révoltés. Already the members of the dominant classes have ceased to appeal to the rectitude of the old regime, and they appeal merely to its utility. Consequently the imminent great revolution is already half won.
Turning to recent history for an example, Kropotkin refers to the Paris commune of 1871 as a mistaken and spurious revolution. Whereas Bakunin regarded this manifestation of civil war as the first "striking and practical" expression of revolutionary socialism, and whereas Marx likewise gave his cordial-approval to the commune, Kropotkin condemns it as an awful example of a revolution devoid of definite aim. On the other hand he describes the great French revolution with loving admiration. As an anarchist, he cares nothing for the parliamentary institutions brought into being by the revolution, but he delights to note how the lower strata of the population, the peasantry no less than the urban proletariat, were won over to the revolution. Obviously, he is thinking of the possibility of an extensive peasant uprising in Russia, such a movement as that of which Bakunin had dreamed. Severe, on the other hand, is his condemnation of the bourgeoisie of that day, and above all his condemnation of the Girondists, so that the account he gives of the Gironde and its political aims differs greatly from that which we owe to liberal historians. But Kropotkin idealises the communists of the council of the Paris commune (Roux, Varlet, etc.) and Chaumette as genuine representatives of the working class. It is plain that Kropotkin is not a scientific historian, and that his historical works are written to further his socio-political ideals.
Kropotkin recognises the right and the duty of individual acts of violence as well as of mass revolution, but in accordance, with his revolutionary principles he demands that an individual act of violence shall only be undertaken in the last resort, as an act of self-defence. For example, he exculpated Perovskaja and was on the most friendly terms with Stepniak,
