Yet the social revolution will not be a reign of terror. "Naturally the fight will demand victims. One can understand how it was that the people of Paris, before they hurried to the frontiers, killed the aristocrats in the prisons, who had planned with the enemy for the annihilation of the revolution. He who would blame the people for this should be asked, 'Have you suffered with them and like them? if not, blush and be still.'"[616] But yet the people will never, like the kings and czars, exalt terror into a system. "They have sympathy for the victims; they are too good-hearted not to feel a speedy repugnance at cruelty. The public prosecutor, the corpse-cart, the guillotine, speedily become repulsive. After a little while it is recognized that such a reign of terror is merely preparing the way for a dictatorship, and the guillotine is abolished."[617] The government will be overthrown first. "There is no need of fearing its strength. Governments only seem terrible; the first collision with the insurgent people lays them prostrate; many have collapsed in a few hours before now."[618] "The people rise, and the State machine is already at a standstill; the officials are in confusion and know not what to do; the army has lost confidence in its leaders."[619] But it cannot stop with this. "On the day when the people has swept away the governments, it will also, without waiting for any directions from above, abolish private property by forcible expropriation."[620] "The peasants will drive out the great landlords and declare their estates common property; they will annul the mortgages and proclaim general release from debt";[621] and in the cities "the people will seize on the entire wealth accumulated there, turn out the factory-owners, and undertake the management themselves."[622] "The expropriation will be general; nothing but an expropriation of the broadest kind can initiate the re-shaping of society--expropriation on a small scale would appear like ordinary plunder."[623] It will extend not only to the materials of production, but also to those of consumption: "the first thing that the people do after the overthrow of the governments will be to provide itself with sanitary dwellings and with sufficient food and clothing."[624]--Yet expropriation will "have its limits."[625] "Suppose by pinching, a poor devil has got himself a house that will hold him and his family. Will he be thrown on the street? Certainly not! If the house is just big enough for him and his family, he shall keep it, and he shall also continue to work the garden under his window. Our young men will even lend him a hand in case of need. But, if he has rented a room to somebody else, the people will say to this one, 'You know, friend, don't you, that you no longer owe the old fellow anything? Keep your room gratis; you need no longer fear the officer of the court, we have the new society!"[626] "Expropriation will extend just to that which