Here we must confess to as great an inability to answer the question as Prince Bismarck or his followers found themselves; for the very simple fact that there are no crimes to answer for. This may account in part for the extra severity of the sentence. Only make the penalty big enough, and the popular mind needs to hear nothing of the crime. Prince Bismarck knows the value of the old adage, “Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.” When the Communists seized upon Paris, we all knew what to expect: scant justice and speedy sentence; none of your careful balancing of right and wrong. They took what they could and gave no reason. This model German government, this new power which we all tremble at, though it promises to regenerate us, follows _la Commune_ pretty closely in this its first essay of power. In the even balance of the law, it is useless to _talk_ of conspiracies, parties, plots, and this, that, and the other. Show us those conspiracies; point them out in black and white; let the law lay its inexorable finger upon them, and say, such and such actions have been committed by such and such persons; here are the proofs of guilt—and we are satisfied. Though the condemned may have been our dearest friends, we have only to acknowledge the justice of the sentence, to deplore that we have been deceived in them, and to range ourselves as honest men and true citizens on the side of the law. But in the present case, we have not had one single fact produced nor attempted to be produced; not a crime in the varied category of crimes has been laid at the door of the accused. We have had instead from such men as Bismarck and his tools vague generalities of “conspiracy,” “enemies at home as well as abroad,” intermingled with fears for the safety of the new empire—“the new creation”—padded in with bluster and empty bombast, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And in the face of this advanced nineteenth century, this era of facts, figures, and freedom, on the strength of evidence that would not suffice to condemn the veriest scoundrel that ever stood face to face with justice in the dock, a body of intellectual gentlemen, beloved in the country from which they are banished, are proclaimed outlaws, enemies of their own nation, faithless to their country and their emperor, unfit to live in the land that is proud of them, and driven without scrip or staff into the world.