How, then, did it come about that people of this character and capacity were regarded almost universally as desperate enemies of society, from the moment when they came to the front in their own city? It is the old story of the hatred of the materialist property-owner and profiteer for the idealist who is eager at once to realise the new period of public possession and co-operative well-being. The fact that such an indomitable anarchist-communist as the famous Blanqui, who spent the greater part of his life in prison, took an active part in the Commune and that others of like views were associated with the rising scared all the "respectable" classes, who regarded any attack upon the existing economic and social forms as a crime of the worst description. A tale current at the time puts the matter in a humorous shape. A number of communists, when arrested, were put in gaol with a still larger number of common malefactors. These latter greatly resented this intrusion, boycotted the political prisoners, and, it is said, would have gone so far as to attack their unwelcome companions but for the intervention of the warders. Asked why they exhibited such animosity towards men who had done them no harm, the ordinary criminals took quite a conservative, bourgeois view of their relations to the new-comers. "We," they said, "have some of us taken things which belonged to other people; but we have never thought for a moment of abolishing the right of property in itself. Not having enough ourselves, we wanted more and laid hands upon what we could get. But these men would take everything and leave nothing for us." So even the gaol-birds embraced the bourgeois ethic of individual ownership.