For the future they would lead easy lives, and be the lords instead of the slaves of their old and detested enemy. In those pretensions and those desires originated the Revolution just suppressed. The war thus undertaken was a Civil War, conducted without the least respect to any laws of war at all. The flight of the Government left the entire Capital not only with all its resources, but with all its treasures and all its inhabitants, in the hands of the insurgents. With these advantages they preferred their demands. They asked for the Capital of France to be delivered over to them as an estate or province within which they might proscribe the worship of GOD, appropriate every form of capital, and depose all authority and all ranks in favour of their own. Failing this, and in the event of their being defeated in the actual war, they asked for amnesty and liberty to depart. At first they reckoned on victory, for the Assembly appeared disorganized and its armies wavering; the support of other great towns was anticipated, and the outlaws of every country in Europe--the veterans of the universal Revolution--had carried their swords to the service of its latest and ripest expression--the Parisian Commune. Moreover, they had tremendous means of extortion in their hands. They held possession of all that was precious and admirable in the Capital of France, and they declared that, if they were neither allowed to prevail nor permitted to escape, they would spare nothing in their vengeance. In preparation for the worst they stored combustibles in the noblest edifices of the city, and then, laying their hands on some of the most eminent and venerated of its inhabitants, they penned them in a body for the contingency of prospective slaughter. They had no more personal animosity against Monseigneur DARBOY than against any statue in the Tuileries or the Louvre. Animate and inanimate objects were marked for destruction on precisely the same grounds--the necessity of putting stress upon the enemy; and the threat was actually executed because its execution might improve the effect of terrorism another day. Of laws or of rules of war these men took not the slightest account. The military leaders of the insurrection had been trained in combats where every imaginable expedient had been held lawful, and the Committee of the International thought no price too high for the realization of their fixed idea. Soldiers and workmen alike were prepared for any extremity of outrage either in pursuit of victory or prosecution of revenge.