the progress of the Versaillese.  Rumour magnified this into a plan of wholesale incendiarism, and wild stories were told of petroleuses flinging oil over buildings, and of Communist firemen ready to pump petroleum.  A squad of infuriated “Reds” rushed off and massacred the Archbishop of Paris and six other hostages, while elsewhere Dominican friars, captured regulars, and police agents fell victims to the rage of the worsted party.

Madness seemed to have seized on the women of Paris.  Even when the men were driven from barricades by weight of numbers or by the capture of houses on their flank, these creatures fought on with the fury of despair till they met the death which the enraged linesmen dealt out to all who fought, or seemed to have fought.  Simpson, the British war correspondent, tells how he saw a brutal officer tear the red cross off the arm of a nurse who tended the Communist wounded, so that she might be done to death as a fighter[62].  Both sides, in truth, were maddened by the long and murderous struggle, which showed once again that no strife is so horrible as that of civil war.  On Sunday, May 28, the last desperate band was cut down at the Cemetery Pere-Lachaise, and fighting gave way to fusillades.  Most of the chiefs perished without the pretence of trial, and the same fate befel thousands of National Guards, who were mown down in swathes and cast into trenches.  In the last day of fighting, and the horrible time that followed, 17,000 Parisians are said to have perished[63].  Little by little, law reasserted her sway, but only to doom 9600 persons to heavy punishment.  Not until 1879 did feelings of mercy prevail, and then, owing to Gambetta’s powerful pleading, an amnesty was passed for the surviving Communist prisoners.

[Footnote 62:  The Autobiography of William Simpson (London, 1903), p. 261.]

[Footnote 63:  G. Hanotaux, Contemporary France, p. 225.  For further details see Lissagaray’s History of the Commune; also personal details in Washburne’s Recollections of a Minister to France, 1869-1877, vol. ii. chaps, ii.-vii.]

The Paris Commune affords the last important instance of a determined rising in Europe against a civilised Government.  From this statement we of course except the fitful efforts of the Carlists in Spain; and it is needless to say that the risings of the Bulgarians and other Slavs against Turkish rule have been directed against an uncivilised Government.  The absence of revolts in the present age marks it off from all that have preceded, and seems to call for a brief explanation.  Obviously, there is no lack of discontent, as the sequel will show.  Finland, portions of Caucasia, and all the parts of the once mighty realm of Poland which have fallen to Russia and Prussia, now and again heave with anger and resentment.  But these feelings are suppressed.  They do not flame forth, as was the case in Poland as late as the year 1863.  What is the reason