tending to dissolve or suppress discontent. As we shall see in
a later chapter, Russia has defied constitutionalism and ground down
alien races and creeds; yet (up to the year 1904) no great rising has
shaken her autocratic system to its base. This seems to prove that the
immunity of the present age in regard to insurrections is due rather to
the triumphs of mechanical science than to the progress of democracy.
The fact is not pleasing to contemplate; but it must be faced. So also
must its natural corollary: that the minority, if rendered desperate,
may be driven to arm itself with new and terrible engines of destruction
in order to shatter that superiority of force with which science has
endowed the centralised Governments of to-day.

Certain it is that desperation, perhaps brought about by a sense of
helplessness in face of an armed nation, was one of the characteristics
of the Paris Commune, as it was also of Nihilism in Russia. In fact the
Communist effort of 1871 may be termed a belated attempt on the part of
a daring minority to dominate France by seizing the machinery of
government at Paris. The success of the Extremists of 1793 and 1848 in
similar experiments--not to speak of the Communistic rising of Babeuf in
1797--was only temporary; but doubtless it encouraged the "Reds" of 1871
to make their mad bid for power. Now, however, the case was very
different. France was no longer a lethargic mass, dominated solely by
the eager brain of Paris. The whole country thrilled with political
life. For the time, the provinces held the directing power, which had
been necessarily removed from the capital; and--most powerful motive of
all--they looked on the Parisian experiment as gross treason to _la
patrie_, while she lay at the feet of the Germans. Thus, the very
motives which for a space lent such prestige and power to the
Communistic Jacobins of 1793 told against their imitators in 1871.

The inmost details of their attempt will perhaps never be fully known;
for too many of the actors died under the ruins of the building they had
so heedlessly reared. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Commune was far
from being the causeless outburst that it has often been represented. In
part it resulted from the determination of the capital to free herself
from the control of the "rurals" who dominated the National Assembly;
and in that respect it foreshadowed, however crudely, what will probably
be the political future of all great