no solution of the problems which they have evoked. These questions and these problems are real. The situation of the working classes, the relations between capital and labor, the rights of the prolétariat and its aspirations after a better lot in life, may well preoccupy all Governments, for, grave as those subjects are already, they will evidently become still more so in the future. But the difficulties which they present have been in no way dealt with by the Commune of Paris; its action has been neither practical nor philosophical; it has been null and void. Forced by the necessities of its situation to give some sort of indication of its views, it has taken refuge in meaningless phrases, of which the sole consequence was to stimulate the discontent of its adherents, without the faintest indication of a remedy for their discontent. After nine years of exist ence, after associating nearly three millions of men in a common bond of union for mutual good, the Internationale has had two months of power; it has shown itself utterly incapable of utilizing that power for any one of the objects which it professed to pursue it has not only done nothing, but it has suggested nothing towards the realization of its theories, and it has ended its purposeless reign by a sanguinary manifestation of its real object and its real means of action-the destruction of everything above it. We have now got the true measure of this society; the Commune of Paris was its child, born of its ambition, nursed by its agents, guided by its counsels, aided by its money: the Commune and the Internationale are one; by the offspring we can judge the parent. Both pursue the same result, the demolition of society, as it is now constituted, in all its elements; but, as we have just seen, without being prepared with one single institution to put to the test in the room of what they pull down. However valueless and unrealizable might have been their schemes, they would at all events have indicated that these destroyers meant to attempt a modification and remodelling of the conditions in which the world at present lives but no; they have proved that their object is to uproot, to burn, and to pillage. After so much talking, after so many promises, this is a miserable result indeed no other one could be expected, that is true, for in the whole teaching of the Internationale there is not a sign of

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creative faculties or intentions; but it is useful to insist upon the fact, so that it may be clearly recognized, and that we may know exactly where the Internationale wants to take us.

In its military organization the Commune showed not only some skill and knowledge of mankind, but also that special form of energy which results from resolute will, and from the feeling that it must conquer or die. Every one of its members knew that he was fighting with a rope round his neck, and the exasperation which resulted from that certainty contributed in a great degree to the efficiency of the defence. But its effect was necessarily only moral, and it influenced the leaders infinitely more than it did their troops, most of whom either gave no thought of the subject, or considered that, if they were beaten, they would receive no worse punishment than prison. Furthermore, the army of the Commune was composed of such varied and conflicting elements that it is impossible to pretend that it was actuated by any general and uniform opinion. The North-Eastern Battalions, who began the insurrection on the 18th March-the men of Belleville and Montmartre were, for the most part, really bent on instituting what they called a "Social Republic," but, as the event has proved, without any idea as to what they meant by the term. These men were generally workmen, but they had lost the habit of labor during the Prussian siege, and found it agreeable to be paid for soldiering, with a prospect of the division of other people's property between them on some future day. whatever may have been their precise motives-which are very difficult to define, because probably they did not know them themselves-it must be recognized that the majority of them were in earnest ; they were pursuing something vague and unexpressed; but they really were pursuing it, and were ready to fight for it. The next class may be considered to have been composed of deserters from the army, thieves let out of prison, and a few foreigners, the scum of their own country. The third and by far the largest class included the men who joined for the sake of the pay (having no work and no means of existence), and those who were forced to serve against their will. In an army made up of such heterogeneous materials

Still,

contain more

no unity of feeling was possible; and though each member of it shouted "Vive la Commune!" it was with an infinite variety of shades of meaning and earnestness. The total number of National Guards enrolled is not exactly known yet, but as the pay-books have been seized, and are now at Versailles, the amount will probably be published soon. The Commune pretended that it had 172,000 men under arms; but no such figure can possibly be admitted. No battalions exceeded 600 men-many of them did not than 200; the average seemed to be about 300, which for the 250 battalions would give 75,000 in all. The men were well clothed, well fed, and generally were well armed; but as for the greater part, they were hopelessly drunk three times a week: their value as soldiers, even behind walls, was not considerable. Still there were brave men amongst them, and with time and discipline they might have been worked up into something like an army. Like all raw troops, they fired wildly, and the quantity of bullets they wasted in the air exceeds all calculation. In the open they were no good at all; on the one occasion when they were really under fire without any cover (it was on the 3d of April, on the march to Versailles), they all ran from the first shell that fell amongst them from Mont Valerien. The artillery, which, as has been already said, included nearly 2,000 cannon and mitrailleuses, was generally well served; the men pointed badly, but they stood steadily to their guns under a bombardment which must have been at moments extremely severe, judging from the noise it made, and from the destruction which it has produced in the forts and fortifications. But the duration of the resistance is not explainable by the number or the courage of the men; it was rendered possible solely by the circumstances which preceded the proclamation of the Commune, and which, for the first time, had drawn together in Paris an immense material of war, the whole of which was employed by the insurrection. With 75,000 men, strong fortifications, and an immense artillery, defence was easy, especially as the attacking army had to be got together, armed, and organized after the 18th March. The erection of that army, under conditions of the greatest difficulty, does the highest honor to

M. Thiers and the generals who seconded his efforts.

As a military operation the siege was singularly uninteresting: its progress was regular from the first moment to the last, and it presented no special features which distinguish it from other attacks on fortified places. But its history, as it is written in the bulletins of the Commune, furnishes a curious example of the height of lying which men can attain when they have once made up their minds to sacrifice everything to the prolongation of a ruined and hopeless position. The attack advanced slowly but steadily from day to day: the Versailles troops never lost a position which they had taken; were never beaten, even in a skirmish; and on no single occasion, from the 2d April forwards, did the Commune gain one step. But day after day, during these weary weeks, Paris was informed that "the Versaillaise were repulsed last night;" that "the rurals were driven headlong from the ground yesterday, with a loss of three hundred killed, we having two men wounded;" that "our fire has silenced the Royalist batteries at Beçon and Courbevoie," that "the gallant defenders of Fort Issy can hold out indefinitely, and have dismounted all the enemy's guns at Meudon;" and so on regularly down to the last hour. And, strangely enough, these inventions were believed by a majority of the National Guard, who really supposed that they had the best of the fighting because the Commune told them so. The men engaged at particular points, of course, knew the truth so far as those points were concerned; but the system adopted by the Commune of never acknowledging a defeat was practiced with such resolution and completeness, that the mass of the garrison was kept in hope and confidence, and that even part of the population felt uncertain about the final result. It was not till about the 15th May that the Guards began to doubt, and grow discouraged; from that date the entrance of the Versailles troops was regarded by everybody as imminent and inevitable. When it took place, on the afternoon of the 21st of May, there was no one on the ramparts to oppose it; and Maréchal Macmahon was able successfully to execute the complicated operation of marching 120,000 soldiers into Paris through three gates in twelve hours. From that

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moment there was an end of the Commune, for though the street-fighting occupied seven days, the mere fact that the Versaillaise were inside terminated the authority of the Hôtel de Ville, and reduced its inmates to a struggle for a few hours' more life behind barricades. But though the civil power of the Commune finished on 22d May, it was from that same day that, having nothing more to lose, it showed itself in its true character. Then began the fires and the assassinations; then began that frightful week which will never be forgotten by those who lived through it, of which no description can convey the horror and the anguish. Over Paris hung a fog of smoke, through which the sun shone dimly the shadows were no longer sharp, their edges were vague and blunted; at night, the moon's light was so weak and sickly, as it struggled through the pall which filled the air, that it gave an unreal look to everything; there was no gas anywhere; no one dared to venture out, for balls were ringing against the house-fronts, and shells were bursting, and smashed stone and glass were falling into the streets. But in the back rooms where the people crouched the news got in, "The Tuileries are burning; the Louvre, the Palais-Royal, the Conseil d'Etat, the Hôtel de Ville, the Ministry of Finance, are all on fire; the hostages are murdered." As the troops advanced, as each quarter was successive ly set on fire, the inhabitants rushed out to look, and, trampling over leaves and branches cut off the trees by shot, and over broken stone and bricks and glass, and through piles of paper torn by the soldiers off the walls, showing where the proclamations of the Commune had been pasted, through pools of water where the paving-stones had been pulled up, past dead horses and dead men, the horses stiff and swollen and the men seemingly flattened and empty,-breathing the choking smoke, they hurried to see the ruins! A ghastly sight it was, but happily it did not last. The streets were cleared with astonishing rapidity, the fires burned out, the barricades were pulled down; and on the afternoon of the seventh day, the closing fight at Belleville having taken place that morning, all Paris was out of doors, and the place looked almost itself again.

So instantaneous was the revival, so rapid the suppression of the traces of

the strife, that it seemed like a waking from a dream; but it was no dream, alas! -the blackened walls stand there still, and the bloodmarks on the walls of La Roquette are not effaced; they show us what the Commune means.

And we need not limit our interpretation of its nature to the evidence which it supplied during its death struggle. It is quite unnecessary to leave the door open for the possible insinuation that the atrocities of the end were provoked by the bitterness of battle and the ferocity of mad revenge. They were not accidents of the moment, provoked by failure and despair; they were resolutely organized beforehand, and formed but the culminating point of an entire system, the only one which the Commune attempted to apply, and which reveals its true sense, its real intentions. That system had but one form of action-repression; but one objectdestruction. During the first few days of its existence the Commune affected to be liberal, but that pretence was soon abandoned. One of its earliest acts was to declare that "the republican authorities of the capital will respect the liberty of the press, like all other liberties;" but it successively suppressed every periodical which criticized its acts, from the "Figaro" and the "Gaulois," which vanished at the commencement, to the "Revue des Deux Mondes," which was suspended on 19th May. All the respectable newspapers in Paris, even the " Siècle," that veteran amongst republicans, were swept away, their place being taken by a variety of new journals devoted to the Commune. The arrests of hostages, the perquisitions on the houses, the pillage in the churches, the seizure of men in the streets, are too well known for it to be necessary to do more than allude to them as elements of the general system. The pulling down of the house of M. Thiers, of the Chapelle Expiatoire (which was not completed for want of time), and of the Column Vendôme, were but first steps towards the general demolition of all that is grand in Paris: and in order that there may be no doubt about this--in order that the preconceived intention to burn the entire city may not be disputed-it is worth while to quote the words which Jules. Valles (member of the Commune) published in the "Cri du Peuple." He said, on two different occasions, "The forts

may be taken one after the other; the ramparts may fall; still no soldier will enter Paris. If M. Thiers is a chemist he will understand us. The

army of Versailles may demolish the ramparts, but let it learn that Paris will shrink from nothing, full precautions are taken." The words in italics are clear enough; they distinctly imply the intention to blow up and burn; and when they are coupled with the formation, about the 10th of May, of a special company of so-called "rocketmen," and with the official requisition, towards the same date, of all the petroleum in Paris, no room is left for doubt as to the reality of the project, or of the preparations which were made, well beforehand, to realize it completely. Still more distinct warnings were given of the intention to establish a second "Terror," different only from the first one in that the guillotine would have been replaced by the chassepot. On the 16th May, after the fall of the Column Vendôme, Miot said in his public speech, "Thus far our anger has been directed only to material objects, but the day is coming when reprisals will be terrible." Ranvier, member of the Committee of Public Safety, declared, on the same occasion, "The Column Vendôme, the house of Thiers, the Chapelle Expiatoire, are but national erections; the turn of traitors and Royalists will inevitably come if the Commune is forced to it." When the moment arrived for the realization of these menaces, the death-warrant of the Archbishop and the other victims was signed by Delescluze and Billioray in the following terms: "Citizen Raoul Rigault is charged, in conjunction with Citizen. Régère, with the execution of the decree of the Commune of Paris relative to the hostages." This decree was followed by another, organizing the fires: "Citizen Millière, with 150 rocketmen, will set on fire the suspected houses and the public monuments on the left bank of the Seine. Citizen Dereure, with 100 men, will do the same in the first and second arrondissements; Citizen Billioray, with 100 men, will take the 9th, 10th, and 20th arrondissements; Citizen Vésinier, with 50 men, is specially intrusted with the Boulevards, from the Madeleine to the Bastille. -Signed, Delescluze, Régère, Ranira, Johannard, Vésinier, Brunel, Dombrowski." And all this was done with wilful obstinacy,

and as part of the adopted system. From the very first, these men refused to negotiate or yield; they meant to destroy, and they waited where they were for that sole purpose. M. Thiers declared, at the commencement of April, that if Paris surrendered at once, he would grant an amnesty to every one but the assassins of Lécomte and Clement Thomas. This announcement was answered by a decree of the Commune, dated 5th April, stating that "every person accused of complicity with the Government of Versailles shall be immediately imprisoned and kept as a hostage;" and by another decree, dated 8th April, proclaiming that "conciliation, under such circumstances, is treason." This evidence proves that from its first hour of existence, the Commune intended to fight it out; to reject all arrangements which might be proposed in the interest of peace; and to place its members and adherents in a position in which clemency towards them was impossible. They might have made terms for themselves if they had wished to do so. They preferred defeat; they publicly announced that they had "made a pact with death," and that they would "bury themselves under the ruins of Paris." They manifested throughout their intention of destruction; and the inhabitants of Paris may indeed rejoice that that intention was only partially fulfilled; not, however, from any hesitation or change of mind on the part of the Commune, but because the entrance of the troops was so sudden and rapid that there was no time to complete the preparations for blowing up and burning the entire city.

The expenditure of the Commune must have reached a total of about £1,800,000, not including the debts which it left unpaid. It published its budget from 20th March to 30th April, showing an outlay, to the latter date, £1,005,000; but as the cost of the last three weeks must have been proportionately much greater than that of the first forty days, a general estimate of £1,800,000 is not likely to be exaggerated. Of the bullion accounted for to 30th April, about £900,ooo was employed for military purposes, and £100,000 for the civil wants of the Commune. The money was provided by the seizure of £186,000 at the Ministry of Finance, by the requisition of £310,000 at the Bank of France, by the appropriation of £70,000 from the sale

of tobacco in Paris, of £22,000 from the Stamp-Office, and of £12,000 from the railroad. The whole of the £600,000 thus obtained belonged to the State; the balance of £400,000 was produced by the municipal receipts of Paris, the octroi contributing £340,000 towards it. No explanation has been given of the origin of the sum spent from 1st to 28th May; all that is known about it with certainty is, that the railway companies were forced to give about £100,000 of it. The Finance Minister of the Commune, M. Jourde, was evidently an intelligent man : the means he employed were violent, but he used them skilfully; and he showed more ability in his department than all his colleagues together, in their various branches of administration which they took upon themselves. He remained in office during the whole duration of the Commune, though he tried to resign on one occasion: his management was therefore continuous, while in all the other departments there were so many changes of ministers, from personal jealousy and accusations of treason, that the policy of no individual was ever pursued for more than a fortnight. The successive Ministers of War, Cluseret, Bergeret, and Rossel, were all imprisoned by their colleagues; the last of them, Delescluze, died in office. Similar changes took place in the other functionaries of the Commune, all fearing the bitter suspicion of its members towards each other, and indicating that they were only prevented from fighting amongst themselves by the absolute necessity of temporary union against Versailles.

Some surprise has been expressed out of France at the relative security of life and property which existed under the Commune, and at the order which was maintained in the streets. It is true that, excepting during the first fortnight, there was no housebreaking, and there was no rioting out of doors, notwithstanding the general drunkenness of the men. Civil disorder was replaced by political tyranny; there was no robbery and no assaults; and it is to the honor of the National Guards that, in the absence of all police and all restraint, they behaved so well. But if one imprudent Parisian was overheard saying a word against the Commune, or in favor of Versailles, he was instantly arrested. Fear was universal,

not only of immediate imprisonment for incivism, or "want of sympathy," but still more of a coming terror, in which the massacres of 1790 would be renewed. Life in Paris under the Commune was dreary and ominous; but, with the exception of the réfractaires and the hostages, no one was absolutely in danger. Danger would evidently have come later on; and it is possible that, if the entrance of the army had been delayed for another week, the number of innocent victims would have been vastly greater. The emptiness and dulness of the streets were scarcely credible; a lady was literally never seen, and not a carriage was visible, unless it happened to contain an officer of the Commune. The upper and middle classes had entirely disappeared; not a a shutter was open in the richer quarters; the witnesses of the scene were reduced to those who, for want of means or other private reasons, were unable to go away. The emigration reached the immense total of 400,000 persons, which, added to the number who had left before and after the Prussian siege, reduced the population from 2,000,000 to 1,200,000. Never has such an exodus occurred before; it must have shown the Commune the nature of the opinions entertained as to its intentions, and have convinced it that it was rightly judged by those who would. have suffered most by it if they had remained in Paris.

The Commune ended by the death of about 14,000 of its adherents, and by the arrest of about 32,000 others. These are such large figures that the Government has been accused of undue severity, and even of needless cruelty: but it should be borne in mind that the executions (which applied to about 8,000 men, 6,000 having been killed in battle) were ordered under circumstances of extraordinary provocation of many kinds. All the public buildings were in flames; women and children were going about with petroleum, seeking to burn the private houses; the troops were fired at from the windows after all the fighting in the neighborhood was over, and in the streets where no engagement had taken place; officers were assassinated; the defence took the form of savage destruction by every possible means; numbers of quiet people insisted on the annihilation of the insurgents, exclaiming that there