Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/84

 78 with the policy and acts of the party they represent. That is surely a logical consequence of the position held by them. That this was the view ostensibly taken by the German military authorities, the pious King of Prussia, afterwards Emperor William, at their head, and tacitly acquiesced in by the middle class conscience throughout the world bars criticism of the hostage incident on grounds of principle. Most of the hostages, e.g., Darboy the Archbishop, Bonjean, the judge of the Court of Cassation, Jecker, the high financier, and the gendarmes, were fair "representatives" of the "enemy," of church, state, police and capitalism in their most aggressive forms. However this point is not worth discussing. Those who howled loudest knew that the action of the Commune was justified, but as with the wolf and the lamb, the typical bourgeois is bound by his traditions and class interests to make out the Commune and all connected with it as having been in the wrong, and he will continue to do so, despite all facts and arguments to the contrary. After all, the best advice to give the authorities of the modern state is "kill not that ye be not killed." The, in this respect, criminally fatuous Commune allowed the Versaillese a free butcher's bill of thousands of its supporters. It was only when, not content with this, they ran it up to tens of thousands, that some of the Commune's adherents were wicked enough to attempt, as they hoped, to check the slaughter by a reprisal consisting of a few tens. The middle-class apparently thinks that its own governing bodies ought to have the uninterrupted enjoyment of an unlimited, and exclusive, monopoly of killing, as regards its opponents. This demand is surely a little bit strong even for a dominant class.

The facts, however, tend to show not merely that the