"It would tear down the tricolor, and set up the red flag of destruction; it would make penny-pieces out of the Column of the Place Vendôme; it would hurl down the statue of Napoleon, and set up that of Marat in its place; it would suppress the Académie, the École Polytechnique, and the Legion of Honor. To the grand motto of 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,' it would add the words, 'or death.' It would bring about a general bankruptcy. It would ruin the rich without enriching the poor. It would destroy labor, which gives each of us his bread. It would abolish property, and break up the family. It would march about with the heads of the proscribed on pikes, fill the prisons with the suspected, and empty them by massacre. It would convert France into a country of gloom. It would destroy liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny God. It would supply work for two things fatal to prosperity,--the press that prints assignats, and the guillotine. In a word, it would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in the ravings of fever; and after the great horrors which our fathers saw, we should have the horrible in every form that is low and base." The party of the Commune has been divided into three classes,--the rascals, the dupes, and the enthusiasts. The latter in the last hours of the Commune (which lasted seventy-three days) put forth in a manifesto their theory of government; to wit, that every city in France should have absolute power to govern itself, should levy its own taxes, make its own laws, provide its own soldiers, see to its own schools, elect its own judges, and make within its corporate limits whatever changes of government it pleased. These Communistic cities were to be federated into a Republic. It was not clear how those Frenchmen were to be governed who did not live in cities; possibly each city was to have territory attached to it, as in Italy in the Middle Ages. The weather during March of the year 1871 was very fine, and fine weather is always favorable to disturbances and revolutions. The very few men of note still left in Paris desirous of putting an end to disorder without the shedding of blood, proposed to go out to Versailles and negotiate with M. Thiers, the provisional president, and the members of his Government. They were the twelve deputies of the Department of the Seine, in which Paris is situated, headed by Louis Blanc, and the _maires_, with their assistants, from the twenty arrondissements. They proposed to urge on the Government of Versailles the policy of giving the Parisians the right to elect what in England would be called a Lord Mayor, and likewise a city council; also to give the National Guard the right to elect its officers.