My dear Toole  I am sending you herewith an excerpt from our circular against the dissidents concerning the functions of the General Council.  All the General Council can do to apply the General Rules and Congress resolutions to concrete cases is to make decisions like a court of arbitration. But their realisation depends in each country entirely on the International itself. From the moment, therefore, that the Council ceased to function as an instrument representing the general interests of the International it would become an utterly powerless cipher. On the other hand the General Council itself is one of the effective forces of the Association and it is indispensable for maintaining the unity of the Association and preventing its seizure by hostile elements. The moral influence which the present Council (notwithstanding all its shortcomings) has been able to gain in face of the common enemy has hurt the pride of those who only saw in the International an instrument for their personal ambition. Above all one must remember that our Association is the militant organisation of the proletariat and by no means a society for the advancement of doctrinaire amateurs. To destroy our organisation at this moment would be tantamount to surrender. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the governments could ask for anything better. Read the report of the backwoodsman Sacaze on Dufaure s draft. What does he admire and fear most in the Association? Its organisation.  We have made excellent progress since the London Conference. New federations have been established in Denmark, New Zealand and Portugal. Our organisation has greatly expanded in the United States, in France (where Malon & Co  as they themselves admit do not have a single section), in Germany, in Hungary, and in Britain (since the formation of the British Federal Council). Irish sections were formed quite recently. In Italy the only important sections, those in Milan and Turin, belong to us; the others are led by lawyers, journalists and other doctrinaire bourgeois. (Incidentally, Bakunin has a personal grudge against me because he has lost all influence in Russia, where the revolutionary youth are on my side.) The resolutions of the London Conference have already been accepted in France, America, Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland (except in the Jura),  also by the genuinely working-class sections in Italy, and finally by the Russians and the Poles. Those who do not recognise this fact won t alter anything thereby, but they will be forced to cut themselves off from the vast majority of the International. I am so overwhelmed with work that I have not even found time to write to my sweet Cockatoo and to dear Schnappy  (about whom I would like to have more news). The International does indeed take up too much of my time, and if I had not been convinced that during this period of struggle my presence in the Council was still necessary, I would have retired long ago. The British government has prevented our celebration of 18 March; I am therefore enclosing resolutions which have been adopted at a meeting of British workers and French refugees... 
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1872