hey preferred their demands. They
asked for the Capital of France to be delivered over to them as an
estate or province within which they might proscribe the worship of GOD,
appropriate every form of capital, and depose all authority and all
ranks in favour of their own. Failing this, and in the event of their
being defeated in the actual war, they asked for amnesty and liberty to
depart. At first they reckoned on victory, for the Assembly appeared
disorganized and its armies wavering; the support of other great towns
was anticipated, and the outlaws of every country in Europe--the
veterans of the universal Revolution--had carried their swords to the
service of its latest and ripest expression--the Parisian Commune.
Moreover, they had tremendous means of extortion in their hands. They
held possession of all that was precious and admirable in the Capital of
France, and they declared that, if they were neither allowed to prevail
nor permitted to escape, they would spare nothing in their vengeance. In
preparation for the worst they stored combustibles in the noblest
edifices of the city, and then, laying their hands on some of the most
eminent and venerated of its inhabitants, they penned them in a body for
the contingency of prospective slaughter. They had no more personal
animosity against Monseigneur DARBOY than against any statue in the
Tuileries or the Louvre. Animate and inanimate objects were marked for
destruction on precisely the same grounds--the necessity of putting
stress upon the enemy; and the threat was actually executed because its
execution might improve the effect of terrorism another day. Of laws or
of rules of war these men took not the slightest account. The military
leaders of the insurrection had been trained in combats where every
imaginable expedient had been held lawful, and the Committee of the
International thought no price too high for the realization of their
fixed idea. Soldiers and workmen alike were prepared for any extremity
of outrage either in pursuit of victory or prosecution of revenge.

Such was the cause and such the conduct of this two months' war; but a
war, nevertheless, it was, waged by a political insurrection on behalf
of a political object. It is very true that the Insurgents aimed at no
form of polity known to the world, and that it would have been
impossible to content them by any measure of civil freedom or political
rights. Their chief and most peremptory demand was, not fo