tery of Père Lachaise were taken. On the twenty-eighth, the last barricade fell and Marshal MacMahon posted the following proclamation: "Inhabitants of Paris, the army of France has saved you. Paris is delivered. At four o'clock our soldiers seized the last positions occupied by the insurgents. Today the struggle is over; order, labor, and security are reborn." The insurrection was ended; the Commune was vanquished.

At the Préfecture of Paris All who were afraid became

Many were shot under

According to the statistics collected by the deputy Camille Pelleton, statistics which have not been disputed, thirty-five thousand Parisians, men, women, and children, were shot during the third period of the revolt and during the eight days which followed the capture of the last barricade. Denunciations were numerous. several hundred thousand were received. informers. Treachery is one form of cowardice. The slightest sign sufficed for an arrest and an order of execution. the pretext that they resembled such and such members of the Commune. Thus several Vallès and Billiorays were shot. As soon as an arrondissement was taken, a sort of military provost was installed before whom the procedure was still more summary than before a court martial, such as the law for a state of siege provides. Such courts were held at the École Militaire, at the Parc Mouceau, at the Dupleix Barracks, at the Collège de France, at the Luxembourg, at the Gobelins, at Châtelet, at the Loban Barracks, at Mazas, at La Roquette, and in the forts. About forty thousand arrests were made. The prisoners were sent to the hulks at Brest, Rochefort, Lorient, Cherbourg, and to a number of places which had been assigned for use as prisons, Versailles, Mont Valérien, St. Germain-en-Laye, and the forts near Paris. Those who were kept under arrest were brought before courts martial which imposed all the penalties of the codes, including that of death, although the advocates of the accused pointed out to the judges that since 1848 the death penalty had been abolished for political offences. Those sentenced to hard labor,— a penalty of common law,-were sent to the prison of Toulon, then to Ile Nou in New Caledonia, those from a quarter lying in the fortifications to the peninsula of Ducos, the others to Ile des Pins; those who were sentenced to simple confinement were distributed among the various prisons of France. Thirty of those condemned to death were executed on the plain of Satory, near Versailles or Vincennes. Repressive measures did not cease until 1879. At that date sentences were still being passed on the insurgents of March, 1871. It was not till after the election of M. Jules Grévy to the presidency of the republic that parliament voted the first partial amnesty. Finally a general amnesty

was passed and promulgated July 14, 1880, the day on which the national festival instituted by the republic in commemoration of the capture of the Bastile was first celebrated. Those who had fled to escape sentence were now able to return to France. The greater number had taken refuge in England and in Switzerland, where extradition for political crimes and offences is not granted. The industries of Paris suffered for a long time from that exodus of skilled workmen. The repressive measures of the government had, in this respect, economic consequences the same as those of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes under Louis XIV.

VI.

Two accusations, among others, have been made against the Commune of 1871: that of having shot hostages, and of having lacked in patriotism. The impartiality of history should determine the worth of these accusations which appear periodically, especially since the Commune is always held up to public execration in the Chamber of Deputies.

We have seen what happened in the case of the hostages, they numbered less than eighty. It is true that, under such circumstances, the gravity of the act cannot be guaged by the number of those who fell. Still it is very difficult to keep from recalling that on one side, there were eighty victims, not one of them a woman or a child, while on the other, there were thirty-five thousand, among them women and children. It must not be forgotten that wounded men at the hospital, for the most part from the first siege of Paris, were butchered in their beds, and that the surgeon who tended them, Dr. Fanan, was shot on May twenty-fourth. Who would venture to say that the massacre of hostages in the Rue Haxo was not caused by the massacre of the wounded at St. Sulpice? Who would maintain that the one was not responsible for the other? The archbishop of Paris was shot at La Roquette. He would have been set at liberty if M. Thiers had not, in spite of urgent solicitations, refused to exchange him for Blanqui, the old revolutionary whom he held at Vanves in the Château du Faurean, and whom the Commune considered as a hostage held by the government of Versailles.

Let us look at the other accusation, that the Commune was lacking in patriotism.

Everything shows that if the revolt was able to develop so rapidly as to gain possession of the whole city, it was because of the patriotic fervor which had seized the inhabitants after the declaration of war, and, above all, after the Prussians had laid siege to Paris. To maintain the contrary one must ignore the fact that those who became the Communards joined the other republicans on September fourth in demanding

the overthrow of the empire which had been disgraced at Sedan. One should read "La Patrie en Danger," a paper of Blanqui that was issued on the morning after September fourth. What is the sole thought of the old revolutionary whom all the preceding régimes had kept in prison? The defence of the soil of the fatherland. Was not the outbreak of October 31, 1870, provoked by the news of the capitulation of Marshal Bazaine at Metz? It was patriotic grief that led the National Guard to attack the Hôtel de Ville. Why was the "red placard" of January 7, 1871, made a subject of reproach to the government? Because it did not order a general levy and a general sally to break the circle of iron which held Paris, and allow volunteers to join the armies with which Gambetta was opposing the invader. Why was there the outbreak of January 22, 1871? Because on January nineteenth, General Trochu had sounded the retreat at Montretout. It is well known that the cannon were removed to Montmartre and Belleville in order to hand them over to the Prussians. Furthermore, one should listen to what the fiercest enemies of the Commune said soon after its defeat. They recognized that love of country had risen to a paroxysm. "I have heard men whom I thought were sane and intelligent," says M. Jules Favre, who, as minister of foreign affairs, demanded of the Powers the extradition of the insurgents, "declare that the best thing to do was to take their wives and children and let them all be killed, saying, 'We prefer to burn our houses than to surrender them to the enemy.' M. Martial Delpit, deputy of the Right, clerk of the committee of parliamentary inquiry on the events of March eighteenth, bears witness to the patriotism of the Parisian populace before the insurrection. Thus, too, General Le Flôqui says, "The military operations had left a most painful impression on the people of Paris, above all, on the National Guard, consisting of two hundred and fifty thousand men partially equipped and showing disposition to fight." Hear, too, M. Thiers himself; his testimony is official: "The entry of the Prussians into Paris," he says, was one of the chief causes of the revolt. I do not say that without this circumstance the uprising would not have occurred, but I do say that the entry of the Prussians gave it an extraordinary impetus."

But then it is asked: If the Parisians were ardent patriots, how is it that they rose in insurrection in the presence of the enemy? We have seen that the Parisians were no insurgents, that they only resented the provocation of the attempt to modify the form of government for the benefit of the Orleans family. Here again a comparison is in place. When the uprising of September 4, 1870, which overthrew the empire, took place, were not the Prussians in France? Were they not marching

victorious on Paris? No republican blames those who overthrew the empire in view of the necessity of saving the country whose destruction seemed imminent. They did not succeed. France was pillaged, dismembered. Her ransom cost six milliards and two provinces. When the uprising of March eighteenth broke out, those who resented the provocation of the uprising pointed to the necessity of saving the endangered Republic, and the Republic was saved.

W. J. ASHLEY

BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ENGLAND

NOR the last five and twenty years or so, young people beginning

F

to read English history have been able to start with some very pleasant notions about the life of their forefathers. According to the books that have been put into their hands, we will hope they have been fortunate enough to be given Green's brilliantly written narrative (1874), but most of the text-books of the period have told the same story,-early English society was once upon a time curiously like some ideals that are widely cherished among "good Americans" and "sound English Liberals." It is true that our forefathers were warlike, and their virtues can only be characterized as rugged; but they were free and independent and self-governing, and models of social and political equality. Some, indeed, were distinguished from their fellows by noble blood and larger homesteads, but this nobility involved no legal privileges, and if it led to their being chosen to preside over the assemblies or to command in war, the choice was purely voluntary. We are, in fact, to compare them not with English squires, but with the "best families" of a New England village. Moreover, although there were slaves attached to the larger homesteads, it would appear that these were relatively few. It was "the common freeman," a tiller of the soil as well as a warrior, who gave its character to society. His holding lay side by side with those of his kinsmen, in one of those free townships which formed the original units of English government; the village moot was the germ out of which have sprung parliament and congress, and the whole nation was simply a body of farmer commonwealths.

When we come to look more closely into these village communities, as the books picture them, they display features in some respects still more interesting, for apparently they anticipated the speculations of some of the most utopian of social philosophers. There was a time when, outside the farmyard, there was no such thing as private property in land, when all ownership was communal. Every freeman was a freeholder, but this meant the possession of a right to a share in the common land. The pasture was used in common and the meadows were annually divided for many centuries. As to the plough land, it might be doubted whether the plan of periodical redistribution was ever practiced after the English left their original German home, and whether

Copyright, 1903, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved.