The usual custom of these human brutes was to place the victim on a chair beneath the tree selected for the purpose, then to throw a rope round his neck and order him to kick away the chair; whenever the victim was unable, owing to his terror of death, to do so, he was beaten with rifle-butts and prodded with knives, until the instinct of escape from this sanguinary torture compelled the writhing victim to comply with the command. These beasts beat greyhaired old men to death; in some cases they gouged out the victims’ eyes before killing them with all the refinement of Bolshevik cruelty. In one case, after hanging a parish notary, they forced his wife, who was approaching confinement, to watch her husband’s death agony. They even slapped the faces of the dead and kicked them, using obscene language in their abusive mockery of their victims. ‘I could not continue to watch these scenes’ an army surgeon confessed; ‘I broke into a convulsive fit of sobbing,—a thing that never once happened to me during four years of service at the front.’ In comparison with these monsters, the jackal is a mere lamb, the rattlesnake an innocent gold-fish. They walked in human guise; but the bestial instinct for plunder and butchery latent within them was not restrained by any human feeling or kept within bounds (was, indeed, rather enhanced) by human intelligence. Yet, undoubtedly, the awful responsibility involved must be borne by those who either directly enjoined or at least watched, tolerated and approved the perpetration of the crimes committed by them. Each of the responsible leaders knew that by ‘Commune’ the criminal means liberty to steal, and by ‘terror’ blind butchery. These leaders were the conscious promoters of a fearful material and moral devastation, and must have known that the very existence of a whole generation of working men was at stake. ‘Thus crimes are born, and curses—but not new worlds!’ With their souls full of hatred, they made boastful promises of earthly bliss to those whom they swept to perdition. ‘No greater catastrophe than Bolshevism could have befallen the working classes,’ says—in one of its manifestoes—the council of the newly-revived Social Democrat Party. Is it worth our while to inquire whether, amid all this horror and terror, there is to be found anywhere even a spark of that ‘holy madness’ which makes the apostle ready to die the death of a martyr for his creed? Rigault, the Chief of Police in the French Commune, and one of its blackest figures, waited in Paris for the coming of the troops from Versailles; when the soldiers thronging into his suburban hotel mistook the proprietor for him and were about to seize him, Rigault hastened towards them with the words—‘I am Rigault! I am neither a brute nor a coward!’ Ten minutes later, Rigault was dead.