iration over the forces
of property and privilege in 1871."[1107] Another leading Socialist
writer says: "Year by year as the 18th of March comes round, it is the
custom with Socialists to commemorate the proclamation of the Commune
of Paris. As a Socialist I am a friend of the Commune."[1108]

What was the Paris Commune, and what did it do? In the words of an
impartial publication, "The Communard chiefs were revolutionaries of
every sect, who, disagreeing on governmental and economic principles,
were united in their vague but perpetual hostility to the existing
order of things. History has rarely known a more unpatriotic crime
than that of the insurrection of the Commune."[1109] "The Commune was
an insurrection which initiated a series of terrible outrages by the
murder of the two generals Lecomte and Thomas.... The incapacity and
mutual hatred of their chiefs rendered all organisation and durable
resistance impossible.... The Communists were committing the most
horrible excesses: the Archbishop of Paris, President Bonjean,
priests, magistrates, journalists, and private individuals, whom they
had seized as hostages, were shot in batches in prisons, and a scheme
of destruction was ruthlessly carried into effect by men and women
with cases of petroleum. The Hotel de Ville, the Palais de Justice,
the Tuileries, the Ministry of Finance, the Palace of the Legion of
Honour, that of the Council of State, part of the Rue de Rivoli, &c.,
were ravaged by the flames; barrels of gunpowder were placed in Notre
Dame and the Pantheon ready to blow up the buildings, and the whole
city would have been involved in ruin if the national troops had not
gained a last and crowning victory."[1110]

Socialists have nothing but praise for the Communards, who killed and
burned, desecrated the churches and devastated the town. They speak
with enthusiasm of the leaders of that outbreak as of heroes who
fought for the "Brotherhood of Man," and they exalt them above the
saints of early Christianity. The philosopher of British Socialism
exclaims: "Limitless courage and contempt of death was displayed in
defence of an ideal, the colossal proportions of which dwarf
everything in history, and which alone suffices to redeem the
sordidness of the nineteenth century. Here was a heroism in the face
of which the much-belauded Christian martyrs cut a very poor
figure."[1111] "It was in the Commune that we saw manifested as never
before the strong compelling