Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Commune of Paris (1896).djvu/7

Rh the Commune of Paris where it was interrupted by the massacres of the Versailles soldiery.

The Commune was defeated, and too well we know how the middle-class avenged itself for the scare given it by the people when they shook their rulers' yoke loose upon their necks. It proved that there really are two classes in our modern society; on one side, the man who works and yields up to the monopolists of property more than half of what he produces and yet lightly passes over the wrong done him by his masters; on the other, the idler, the spoiler, hating his slave, ready to kill him like game, animated by the most savage instincts as soon as he is menaced in his possession.

After having shut in the people of Paris and closed all means of exit, the Versailles Government let loose soldiers upon them; soldiers brutalised by drink and barrack life, who had been publicly told to make short work of "the wolves and their cubs." To the people it was said:

And after this mad orgie, these piles of corpses, this wholesale extermination, came the petty revenge, the cat-o'-nine tails, the irons in the ship's hold, the blows and insults of the warders, the semi-starvation, all the refinements of cruelty. Can the people forget these doughty deeds.

Overthrown, but not Conquered, the Commune in our days is born again. It is no longer a dream of the vanquished, caressing in imagination the lovely mirage of hope. No! the "Commune" of to-day is becoming the visible and definite aim of the Revolution