Shall hateful tyrants, mischief-breeding, With hireling hosts, a ruffian band, Affright and desolate the land, While Peace and Liberty lie bleeding? To arms! to arms, ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe! March on! March on! all hearts resolved On Liberty or death.[1105] In the eyes of many British Socialists the French Revolution was not sufficiently democratic, not sufficiently radical, not sufficiently violent. We are told that the French revolutionaries were soft-hearted men, and that our sympathy with their innocent victims, such as Queen Marie Antoinette, is quite uncalled for. "The Revolution was in its conception, its inception, and its results a middle-class revolution. The revolution was inaugurated by the Parliament of Paris--a pettifogging legal assembly. Marie Antoinette was but one fine useless woman among the millions, and she personified the heedless prodigal selfishness of autocracy. We of the Socialist movement, who are full of the idea of social service, of making a full return to society for the bread we eat, the clothes we wear out, and the house-room we occupy, how can we be expected to think so much of the suffering of one idle extravagant woman and so little of the age-long privation and torture of the hard-working useful mothers and sisters of France? The crimes of ignorant, passionate democracy, of which Burke and Carlyle have made so much, are as a drop in the ocean by comparison with the deliberate enormities perpetrated by enlightened cold-blooded autocracy, from Herod to Nicholas. The democracy has always been pitiful, extremely pitiful. Even the September massacres, carried out by the lowest of the low in an enraged and degraded and terror-stricken populace, are brightened by golden patches of clemency and love such as the annals of class punishment nowhere reveal."[1106] The outbreak of the Paris Commune of 1871, having been less a "middle-class" revolution, is considered by Socialists with greater approval than the French Revolution of 1789. The philosopher of British Socialism writes: "The Commune of Paris is the one event which Socialists throughout the world have agreed with single accord to celebrate. Every 18th of March witnesses thousands of gatherings throughout the civilised world to commemorate the (alas! only temporary) victory of organised Socialist aspiration over the forces of property and privilege in 1871."[1107] Another leading Socialist writer says: "Year by year as the 18th of March comes round, it is the custom with Socialists to commemorate the proclamation of the Commune of Paris. As a Socialist I am a friend of the Commune."[1108]