from the question of foreign engagements and the claims which those engagements may make upon our honour, we need a coherent and elastic organisation, which can give us an overwhelming superiority of numbers on our own soil at least, and which can be called into efficient activity at a few days' notice. We are deliberately of opinion that a competent Government can and ought to give us this, and to give it us with a proportionate, if not an absolute, diminution of our colossal expenditure. Whether the present Ministers can do this, next Session will show. We wait for the evidences with misgiving.

ART. IX.-1. Paris sous la Commune. E. Moriac. Paris, 1871. 2. Le Gouvernement du 4 Septembre et la Commune de Paris. E. Andreoli. Paris, 1871.

3. Les 73 Journées de la Commune. Catulle Mendes. Paris, 1871. 4. L'Internationale. O. Testut. Paris, 1871.

5. Le Livre noir de la Commune de Paris. Brussels, 1871. 6. The Civil War in France. Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association. London, 1871. 7. Programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association with an explanatory Statement. By John Stuart Mill. London, 1871.

THE

THE changes of French politics are so rapid that it seems late now to discuss the reign of the Commune as a chapter of contemporary history. Its ruin has been almost repaired; the survivors among its once-dreaded leaders have covered themselves with ridicule; its causes and misdeeds are all but forgotten in speculations upon the result of the new experiment in republicanism which the French are trying for the instruction of mankind. Nor is it a story upon which any one can reflect with pleasure. It was a strange, disordered period, in which all moral and intellectual qualities were crossly fitted together; in which only the cruel were spirited, in which only the loyal were feeble, in which only the mean were wise. An exception must be made in favour of the clergy, whose conduct, from the Archbishop downwards, emulated the finest examples of Christian courage and fidelity. But, outside their ranks, nothing could be more piteous than the exhibition of human character which this brief period affords. A Government without forethought, or promptitude, or settled policy; an army fresh from defeat, but still bold enough for an apparently safe mutiny; a few brave, bad men, remarkable for almost every evil quality except that of fear; a rabble who, to use the words of their own English advocate, 'believed in no God and in no man,' but yet perished

with the courage of fanatics; and an orderly, 'well-affected' majority, equally distinguished for the rectitude of their opinions and the cowardice of their behaviour. Neither Raoul Rigault nor Gallifet, neither the assassins of Montmartre, nor the imbecile party of order at the West End, are figures on which any one would care to dwell if their exploits could be separated from the history of the moving forces of our time. But the story of the Commune, its origin and its fate, are no isolated episodes in the revolutionary annals of France. As far as we can judge, it is the preface to a controversy which will thrust what we call politics into the background, in favour of a social conflict the most critical and the most embittered that has yet shaken the fabric of civilisation.

And the brotherhood of nations is too close to suffer the appearance of these storm-signals upon a neighbouring soil to be matter of indifference to us. English politics have always been peculiarly susceptible to foreign influences. Any great conflict of classes or opinions on the Continent finds its immediate echo here. In the matter of political innovation we are not an original people. Our agitations, like our dramas, are generally translated from the French; but in the present case our interest is more direct. The organisation which carried out the Revolution of the 18th of March does not profess to accept the frontiers of nations as the limits of its action. It aspires to be the combination of the workmen of all countries against the employers of all countries. It depreciates patriotism, both as a sentiment belonging to the old order of things, and as tending to hinder the purely class sympathy which is to enable the workman to subdue every other power to his own. Its first act at Paris, while the bitter resentments of the war were yet at their height, was to place Franckel, a Prussian, among the governing body of the Commune. The movements of the Paris Socialists, as of the whole Internationale, were governed by a Committee sitting in London. The relations which the Commune held at first with the national enemy of the French: the number of foreigners of all nations-Germans, Poles, Italians, Russians, Americans who appeared among its members and officers: the ostentatious destruction of the Vendôme column, sufficiently show that the fact of the Internationale having made its first public appearance as a revolutionary power in France implies no special connection with the people of France, and certainly no restriction of its activity to that country.

One or two ingenious writers have started and attempted to sustain the theory that the Commune had nothing to do with the Internationale, but that the movement was simply a struggle to regain municipal liberties. It is a theory which has been seriously defended nowhere out of England, and here it has obviously been

manufactured

manufactured to catch a popular prepossession. The absurdity of the idea reveals itself the moment that the words used are subjected to definition. There is something very grand in the phrase municipal liberties.' It rouses a crowd of inspiring associations connected with the struggles of medieval burgesses against the tyranny of feudal barons, and it touches powerfully the parochial instincts which are keen in the breast of every Englishman. But municipal liberties, if you come to count them, are not the things for which people get themselves and their neighbours shot. They mean, with us, the power of looking to the drains, keeping the pavement in good order, regulating the dustman and the water-cart, fighting the gas and water companies, and, moreover, of exercising all these cherished privileges without interference from the central government. To this list may be added the power of making such streets as Parliament allows to be made, levying such rates as are prescribed by law, choosing and paying the police who are to act under the orders of the executive. Men do not die upon the barricades for prerogatives of this sort. The authorities of St. Pancras, in our own metropolis, probably carry the enthusiasm of vestrydom as high as it has ever risen in the human heart, and they detest the central government with a hatred which will yield to no other upon earth. But their emotions have never reached even to the mildest tint of the heroic. Adequate objects are needed to excite these deadly resolves. The Commune was doing battle for something more attractive than any vestry or common council powers. The liberties it claimed, like many of the liberties for which men cry the loudest, meant the liberty of doing as it liked with the lives and property of other people.

If no other evidence were at hand, the composition of the Commune would sufficiently indicate that a complete social revolution in the supposed interest of the workmen was the main end of the movement, though a re-settlement of the form of Government on principles which should give or secure preponderance to the great cities, may have been part of the machinery by which that end was to be attained. Assi, who organised the strike at Creuzot, was one of the chief contrivers of the revolution of the 18th of March; and after it he was for some time president of the Comité Central, and Governor of the Hôtel de Ville. Theisz was the first Vice-President of the Comité Central, and was afterwards Directeur des Postes.* Both were prominent members of the Internationale. Varlin,

*M. Theisz entertains no doubt as to the real nature of the Communal movement. In a letter recently addressed to the Constitution,' to defend himself against the charge of having betrayed it, he says, I remained faithful to the Commune and to the Socialistic ideas which it was its mission to represent and to realise.' the

the chief of the Paris Section of the Association, was the first Finance Minister of the revolution. Avrial, an active member of the Association, was on the first executive Commission. Franckel, the German Socialist, was Minister of the department of Labour and Exchange, under the Commune. Cluseret, if not a member, acted as agent of the Internationale in America. Millière was appointed editor of the Marseillaise,' in 1869, when the Association succeeded in securing the services of that journal as its organ. Chalain, Duval, Johannard, Verdure, Pindy, Malon, Murat, Parent, Dupont, Clemence, Vesinier, were members of the Commune, and influential members of the Internationale.

Not less significant was the formal assistance and support which the revolution received from the Internationale five days after its occurrence. On the 23rd of March the Internationale issued an address to the workmen, urging them to sustain it. We give one passage:

-

• The division (insolidarité) of interests has caused the general ruin and has engendered a social war: it is to liberty, equality, and community (solidarité) that you must look to secure order upon new bases, to reorganise labour which is its first condition. Workmen, the communal revolution affirms these principles, and arrests all cause of conflict in the future. Will you hesitate to give it your final sanction?'

What these principles are we shall shortly show more in detail; for the present our concern is to show that in the judgment of the Internationale, the Commune and itself were acting together in support of a common cause.

*

The revolutionary leaders on their side were not less explicit. Veiling their socialism under ambiguous phrases, in proclamations that were meant for the middle classes, their language addressed to the workmen was clear enough. Even in its address to the provinces (April 19), the Commune reserves to itself liberty to create institutions fitted to universalise property and power;' but to the workmen the Comité Central speaks more plainly:

Workmen, do not deceive yourselves. It is the great struggle-it is parasitism and labour, exploitation and production that are wrestling together. If you are weary of vegetating in ignorance and crouching in destitution-if you wish your children to be men enjoying the profit of their labours, and not a sort of animals prepared for the workshop or the battlefield, enriching by their sweat some speculator's wealth, or shedding their blood for a despot. up, and let your sturdy hands cast this unclean reaction beneath your feet.'-Comité Central, April 5. Again, in a skilful appeal to the peasantry, issued in the middle of May :

...

'COMMUNE OF PARIS.

Brother, they deceive you. Our interests are the same. That

which I am asking for is also what you wish: the emancipation I am seeking, is yours as well. What matters it whether it is in town or country that food and clothing, shelter and succour, are lacking to him who produces all the riches of the world? What matters it whether the oppressor is called a capitalist or a landlord. With you as with us the working day is long and hard, and does not yield enough even to satisfy the necessities of the body. To you as to us, liberty, leisure, the life of the heart and the spirit, are wanting. You and we, now and ever, are still the vassals of misery.

'It is now near upon a century that you, poor day labourer, have been taught that property is the consecrated reward of labour, and you believe it. But open your eyes and look around you; look at yourself, and you will see that it is a lie. You are old: you have always laboured; you have passed every day, from dawn to nightfall, with the spade or the sickle in your hands: and yet you are not richyou have not even a bit of bread for your old age. All your earnings have been spent in rearing painfully those children whom the conscription will tear from you, or who, marrying in their turn, will live, as you have lived, like beasts of burden, and will die, as you are about to die, miserably. .. No brother, labour does not lead to property. It is transmitted by chance or is gained by cunning. The rich are the sluggards, the workmen are the poor-and poor they will remain. That is the rule anything that is otherwise is only an exception.

This is not just. And therefore Paris, whom on the faith of men interested to deceive you, you are accusing, Paris moves, protests, revolts; and determines to change the laws which give the rich all power over the poor. . . . Paris demands that every man who is not a landowner, shall not pay a farthing of tax: that those who have only a house and garden shall be equally exempt; that small fortunes shall be taxed but lightly, and that all the burden of taxation shall fall upon the rich. . . . Paris finally demands-listen to this, country workman, poor day labourer, farmer of every tenure, small freeholder eaten up by usury, all you who sow, reap, and sweat, that the best of your produce shall go to some one who does nothing that which Paris demands, to sum up, is the land for the peasants, the instruments of his labour to the workman, and work for all. . . . Yes the fruits of the earth to those that cultivate it: his own to each man, and work for all.'*

It is needless to multiply proofs that the cause of the Internationale and the cause of the Commune were one. We abstain, therefore, from quoting the passionate address issued by the Internationale, shortly after the fall of the Commune, defending its most murderous excesses, and glorying in its Socialist aims. But the document is well worth studying by those who wish to know, from their own mouth, the views of the associated workmen.

The Internationale, whose first appearance this is upon the revolutionary stage, will probably henceforth receive more attention, both from practical statesmen and from political writers,

* Andreoli, p. 334.

than