ir motive or their excuse in principles that
demand the demolition of all upon which the civilisation of Europe has
its basis-worship, property, and marriage--in order to reconstruct a new
civilisation adapted to a new humanity, it is scarcely possible for
the serenest contemporary to keep his mind in that state of abstract
reasoning with which Philosophy deduces from some past evil some
existent good. For my part, I believe that throughout the whole known
history of mankind, even in epochs when reason is most misled and
conscience most perverted, there runs visible, though fine and
threadlike, the chain of destiny, which has its roots in the throne
of an All-wise and an All-good; that in the wildest illusions by which
muititudes are frenzied, there may be detected gleams of prophetic
truths; that in the fiercest crimes which, like the disease of an
epidemic, characterise a peculiar epoch under abnormal circumstances,
there might be found instincts or aspirations towards some social
virtues to be realised ages afterwards by happier generations, all
tending to save man from despair of the future, were the whole society
to unite for the joyless hour of his race in the abjuration of soul and
the denial of God, because all irresistibly establishing that yearning
towards an unseen future which is the leading attribute of soul,
evincing the government of a divine Thought which evolves out of the
discords of one age the harmonies of another, and, in the world within
us as in the world without, enforces upon every unclouded reason the
distinction between Providence and chance.

The account subjoined may suffice to say all that rests to be said of
those individuals in whose fate, apart from the events or personages
that belong to graver history, the reader of this work may have
conceived an interest. It is translated from the letter of Frederic
Lemercier to Graham Vane, dated June ----, a month after the defeat of
the Communists.

"Dear and distinguished Englishman, whose name I honour but fail to
pronounce, accept my cordial thanks for your interests in such remains
of Frederic Lemercier as yet survive the ravages of Famine, Equality,
Brotherhood, Petroleum, and the Rights of Labour. I did not desert my
Paris when M. Thiers, 'parmula non bene relicta,' led his sagacious
friends and his valiant troops to the groves of Versailles, and confided
to us unarmed citizens the preservation of order and property from the
insurgents who