"We must rise above our enemies by moral force...." preached Vermorel. "We must not infringe liberty and individual life...." Striving to avoid fratricidal war, Vermorel called upon the liberal bourgeoisie, whom hitherto he had so mercilessly exposed, to set up "a lawful Government, recognized and respected by the whole population of Paris." The _Journal Officiel_, published under the editorship of the Internationalist Longuet, wrote: "The sad misunderstanding, which in the June days (1848) armed two classes of society against each other, cannot be renewed.... Class antagonism has ceased to exist...." (March 30.) And, further: "Now all conflicts will be appeased, because all are inspired with a feeling of solidarity, because never yet was there so little social hatred and social antagonism." (April 3.) At the session of the Commune of April 25, Jourde, and not without foundation, congratulated himself on the fact that the Commune had "never yet infringed the principle of private property." By this means they hoped to win over bourgeois public opinion and find the path to compromise. "Such a doctrine," says Lavrov, and rightly, "did not in the least disarm the enemies of the proletariat, who understood excellently with what its success threatened them, and only sapped the proletarian energy and, as it were, deliberately blinded it in the face of its irreconcilable enemies." (Page 137.) But this enfeebling doctrine was inextricably bound up with the fiction of democracy. The form of mock legality it was that allowed them to think that the problem would be solved without a struggle. "As far as the mass of the population is concerned," writes Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, "it was to a certain extent justified in the belief in the existence of, at the very least, a hidden agreement with the Government." Unable to attract the bourgeoisie, the compromisers, as always, deceived the proletariat. The clearest evidence of all that, in the conditions of the inevitable and already beginning civil war, democratic parliamentarism expressed only the compromising helplessness of the leading groups, was the senseless procedure of the supplementary elections to the Commune of April 6. At this moment, "it was no longer a question of voting," writes Arthur Arnould. "The situation had become so tragic that there was not either the time or the calmness necessary for the correct functioning of the elections.... All persons devoted to the Commune were on the fortifications, in the forts, in the foremost detachments.... The people attributed no importance whatever to these supplementary elections. The elections were in reality merely parliamentarism. What was required was not to count voters, but to have soldiers: not to discover whether we had lost or gained in the Commune of Paris, but to defend Paris from the Versaillese." From these words Kautsky might have observed why in practice it is not so simple to combine class war with interclass democracy.