“The Commune”

Despite the infamy with which they covered themselves in 1871, the Communists are yet secretly organized and by no means despicable in numbers. Through the Internationale they correspond with affiliated societies, not only in the Continental States, but also in England and America. They are recruited from the worst elements, such as have no sympathy with the existing order of things, and who desire a social as well as political revolution. They are as hostile to the Republic of the United States as to the most absolute despotism. They, in fact, hate it more than any other, as its demonstration of the possibility of self-government prevents the success of Communism. If they could destroy it they would have removed the last obstacle in their way, and would force the adoption of their own theories as the sole means of securing complete individual liberty and universal equality of property and rights. Under their system there would be no rich men, because all property would be held in common, and the earnings, of each would go for the support of all. In other words, individual property would cease to exist. To any one not bereft of reason it is easy to see that this would lead to the extinction of personal enterprise, to the arrest of the progressive march of the age, to moral stagnation, and to social degradation.

Communism is in full play in Russia, and there it has had an opportunity to display its power for good and evil. It has covered that empire with a dense torpidity; it has destroyed individualism, and has kept all its members on the same level, and has checked the ambition for a higher and better state of things. The individual has been sacrificed to the community, and no one can rise, be his genius or talent what it may. A more certain mode of debasing the human species could not well be devised. It is the relentless foe of whatever has contributed to the prosperity, happiness, and development of modern States and peoples; and worse than all, it is in conflict with every principle of republican freedom of ancient and modern times. The right of the individual to the unfettered exercise of his own powers, to the gains of his industry, and to the acquisition of property, which is the essence of true republicanism, is denied by Communism. It is a standing conspiracy against progress, liberty, and Christian civilization.

The Internationale is a secret organization, with salaried officers and agents actively at work in Europe and America, the declared enemy of the political institutions of every country and every religion, atheistical, anarchical, and subversive of established notions of right and justice. When the mot d'ordre (watchword) is given to stir up strife, to raise mobs, to kindle insurrections against governments, it must be obeyed. Its orators are specially instructed to denounce corporations, the accumulations of capitalists, the right of anybody to rule but the Communists, and to advocate the redistribution of property, the abolition of all distinctions created by individual effort, and the entire re-organization of society. One of the leading Internationalists recently boasted that the American Republic would ere long be supplanted by Communism, and that as there would then be no capital there could be no further strife between capital and labor.

One of the members of the French, Commune thus defines its objects:

“Their philosophy is atheism, materialism— the negation of all religion. Their political programme is, absolute individual liberty by means of the suppression of government and the division of nationalities into communes more or less federated. Their political economy consists essentially in the dispossession, without compensation, of the present holders of capital, and in assignment of the coin, land, etc., to associations of workingmen.”

I ask you, citizens of the greatest Republic of modern times, if you are willing to surrender your noble institutions for such a system of villainy? Are you, descendants of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, to unlearn all that the wisdom of your Revolutionary sages has taught you, and to become the pupils and followers of the madmen, who, in 1871, acted more like savage beasts than human beings, and attempted the destruction of the most beautiful city of Europe? Wherever the International Society is in operation it will be a fomenter of disorder; for its aim is, in the words of one of its most eminent leaders, “the suppression of government.” It will take advantage of every commotion to widen the breach between the different classes of society, and it will enlist in its service all who are the enemies of established authority, and who, like the Communists, hope to live on the labor and earnings of others.

The Commune would not have obtained control of Paris but for the treachery and demoralization of the National Guard. The city had hardly been evacuated by the Germans before the worst elements of the Paris population came to the front. They swarmed into the center of the city from their hiding places in the batignolles, the Faubourg San Antoine, and the quarries of Montmartre, demanding bread, money, and the punishment of the aristocrates. In their speech this is a general term, meaning all decent people who live genteelly on the means they have accumulated by lives of honest industry. Their ranks were recruited from the prisons, from the lazarhouses, and the haunts of crime. Having established a mockery of a government at the Hotel de Ville, they closed the gates of Paris, refused to allow the army to enter, and declared themselves the rulers of France. Commissions were organized to hunt up suspected persons, to administer justice on the spot, to shoot, to hang, and put to death at will. The ordinary forms of justice were dispensed with as too tardy in their movements. Respectable citizens were dragged from their dwellings, subjected to a few interrogatories by a gang of sans culottes, pronounced guilty, whether the evidence was exculpatory or not, placed against a wall, and then shot down. This done, the same ceremony was performed elsewhere with the same accompaniments. The Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Darboy, was seized and held as a hostage at first, only, at last, to be foully murdered. Not a citizen eminent for public or private virtue whose life was not in danger from these sanguinary despots of mob rule.

Base men hate nothing so much as superior excellence. When, after a resistance of two months, they found that Marshal MacMahon, with his army 90,000 strong, was too formidable to be any further opposed, they make a last desperate stand behind barricades in the principal streets. When these defenses were no longer tenable, they determined to involve Paris in their own ruin. They set on fire the Palace of the Tuileries, the Palais de Justice, the Hotel de Ville, the Louvre, and other public buildings, the ornament and glory of Paris, masterpieces of architecture, rich in associations of historical fame, and containing treasures of art that could never be replaced. Nothing was sacred in their eyes. Even the Napoleonic column in the Place Vendome, covered with sculptured bas-reliefs of the martial glories of France, they leveled to the ground. All that was refined, monumental, and grand was odious to them; for, like the Goths and Vandals, they warred on civilization. The magnificent range of the Tuileries was burned to the ground, the Louvre narrowly escaping alike fate. The Hotel de Ville, which had cost millions and was one of the finest edifices of Europe, became a mass of smoking ruins.

A little longer and all the sacred edifices would have been given up to the flames, and Paris itself might have ceased to exist. Trains of powder were found laid near petroleum in the sewers to blow up the city and leave it a wreck. Never in the worst times—no, not even in the bloody Revolution of 1789, did such fiends arise to disgrace the human shape they wore, and to dishonor the name of man. These infuriated demons were fought by the French army under the conduct of Theirs, Gambetta, and the Republican leaders as the enemies of France, liberty, and Christian principles. They were the legitimate successors of Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, and the men who during the Reign of Terror covered France with havoc and massacre. Foiled here, their aim is now to repeat the same scenes in Republican America, and on the ruins of your institutions to erect their arbitrary rule, with the guillotine as the instrument of their vengeance. Let the savage barbarities, the incendiarism, and the licentiousness of the Communists of 1789 and 1871 in France warn you, Americans, of thee fate reserved for your now happy country should it fall into the hands of the same class of men.

--- Paris Correspondence of the Philadelphia Press.