Perhaps you will say that I have forgotten the International and the Commune. There is undoubtedly a close connection between the labour movement and democracy, between the struggle for industrial and the struggle for political emancipation, as there is a connection between both and Secularism, the frank form assumed among the working men by that which is concealed and conformist Scepticism among the upper class. In this respect the present industrial crisis resembles those of the past which as we have seen were closely connected with religious and political revolutions. In truth the whole frame of humanity generally moves at once. With the International, however, as an organ of political incendiarism, labour had very little to do. The International was, in its origin, a purely industrial association, born of Prince Albert's International Exhibition, which held a convention at Geneva, where everybody goes pic-nicing, for objects which, though chimerical, were distinctly economical, and free from any taint of petroleum. But a band of political conspirators got hold of the organization and used it, or at least, so much of it as they could carry with them, for a purpose entirely foreign to the original intent. Mark, too, that it was not so much labour or even democracy that charged the mine which blew up Paris, as the reactionary Empire, which, like reaction in countries more nearly connected with us than France, played the demagogue for its own ends, set the labourers against the liberal middle class, and crowded Paris with operatives, bribed by employment on public works. I detest all conspiracy, whether it be that of Ignatius Loyola, or that of Karl Marx- -not by conspiracy, not by dark and malignant intrigue, is society to be reformed, but by open, honest and kindly appeals to the reason and conscience of mankind. Yet, let us be just, even to the Commune. The destruction of the column at the Place Vendome was not a good act; but if it was in any measure the protest of labour against war, it was a better act than ever was done by the occupant of that column. On that column it was that, when Napoleon's long orgy of criminal glory was drawing to a close, the hand of misery and bereavement wrote "Monster, if all the blood you have shed could be collected in this square, you might drink without stooping." Thiers is shooting the Communists; perhaps justly, though humanity will be relieved when the gore ceases to trickle, and vengeance ends its long repast. But Thiers has himself been the literary arch-priest of Napoleon and of war: of all the incendiaries in France, he has been the worst.