Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/80

 74 and diagnosis of these "thrills of horror" be studied it will be seen that they regulate themselves in a singularly accurate manner in accordance with the danger to the existing order of society which the bourgeois thinks he sees in the nature of the act supposed to cause them. The murder of soldiers by their officers, and on occasion the shooting of harmless passers-by by sentries, are simply regrettable incidents of "military discipline," a thing necessary to the existence of the modern bureaucratic state. Besides, no matter what the acts they commit it would be subversion of all "order" to thrill with horror at anything done by "heads of states" or even inferior Government functionaries in their official capacity.

At the time of the Commune I was not up to all this. Accordingly my innocent surprise at the number of mere domestic human lives it must take to equal that of an archbishop was considerable.

It was not for some time that I saw the full meaning of all the crocodile tears and caterwauling over the handful of hostages—not only that it was meant to drown the silent appeal for vengeance of the thousands of slaughtered workmen whose murder had led up to the retributive execution in question, but that this wholesale brew of horrific emotion (?) formed part of a tacitly understood, though none the less definite policy of the bourgeois world according to which moral judgments are to be dictated solely by political expediency, and the requisite sentiment pumped up to order.

The present Anarchist madness, of course, gives plenty of scope for the well-calculated fabrication of these newspaper and platform hysterics. The facts of the case are simply that the Anarchists in their foolish attempts to overthrow, by individual acts of violence, the existing order