rike, killed a policeman, and had
been condemned to the galleys for murder. The men who thus constituted
themselves a Government, were all members of the International,--that
secret association, formed in all countries, for the abolition of
property and patriotism, religion and the family, rulers, armies,
upper classes, and every species of refinement. Another proclamation
decreed that the people of Paris, whether it pleased them or not,
must on Wednesday, March 22, elect a commune.

In a former chapter I have tried to explain the nature of a commune.
Victor Hugo wrote his opinion of it, when the idea of a commune
was first started, after the fall of Louis Philippe in 1848. His
words read like a prophecy:--

"It would tear down the tricolor, and set up the red flag of
destruction; it would make penny-pieces out of the Column of the
Place Vendome; it would hurl down the statue of Napoleon, and set
up that of Marat in its place; it would suppress the Academie,
the Ecole Polytechnique, and the Legion of Honor. To the grand
motto of 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,' it would add the
words, 'or death.' It would bring about a general bankruptcy. It
would ruin the rich without enriching the poor. It would destroy
labor, which gives each of us his bread. It would abolish property,
and break up the family. It would march about with the heads of the
proscribed on pikes, fill the prisons with the suspected, and empty
them by massacre. It would convert France into a country of gloom. It
would destroy liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny
God. It would supply work for two things fatal to prosperity,--the
press that prints assignats, and the guillotine. In a word, it
would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in the ravings
of fever; and after the great horrors which our fathers saw, we
should have the horrible in every form that is low and base."

The party of the Commune has been divided into three classes,--the
rascals, the dupes, and the enthusiasts. The latter in the last
hours of the Commune (which lasted seventy-three days) put forth
in a manifesto their theory of government; to wit, that every city
in France should have absolute power to govern itself, should levy
its own taxes, make its own laws, provide its own soldiers, see to
its own schools, elect its own judges, and make within its corporate
limits whatever changes of government it pleased. These Communistic
cities were to be federated into a R