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 Republic.  It was not clear how those Frenchmen were to be governed who did not live in cities; possibly each city was to have territory attached to it, as in Italy in the Middle Ages.

The weather during March of the year 1871 was very fine, and fine weather is always favorable to disturbances and revolutions.

The very few men of note still left in Paris desirous of putting an end to disorder without the shedding of blood, proposed to go out to Versailles and negotiate with M. Thiers, the provisional president, and the members of his Government.  They were the twelve deputies of the Department of the Seine, in which Paris is situated, headed by Louis Blanc, and the maires, with their assistants, from the twenty arrondissements.  They proposed to urge on the Government of Versailles the policy of giving the Parisians the right to elect what in England would be called a Lord Mayor, and likewise a city council; also to give the National Guard the right to elect its officers.

This deputation went out to Versailles on the 20th of March,—­two days before the proposed election for members of a commune.  On the 21st, while all Paris was awaiting anxiously the outcome of the mission, there was a great “order” demonstration in the streets, and hopes of peace and concord were exchanged on all sides.  The next day, the order demonstration, which had seemed so popular, was repeated, when a massacre took place on the Place Vendome and the Rue de la Paix.  Nurses, children, and other quiet spectators were killed, as also old gentlemen and reporters for the newspapers.  One of the victims was a partner in the great banking house of Hottinguer, well known to American travellers.