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by voluntary contributions under Royal or Parliamentary patronage, and before we answer the question put by Mr. Jessel as to the funds necessary for this undertaking, we should wish to be informed why the Inns of Court and of Chancery cannot be rescued by the authority of Parliament from their present condition, and restored to their ancient and proper uses? It is admitted that they are public corporations. They are known to be rich, though no one clearly knows to what purposes their funds are applied. They exercise considerable powers. But till recently they had allowed their duties as the educators of the legal profession to fall into desuetude, and these duties are still most imperfectly discharged. We wish to see the Inns of Court and of Chancery restored to their proper objects and their pristine activity; and before we can give an unqualified assent to Sir Roundell Palmer's proposal to found a new School of Law in London, we desire that the old Schools of Law, which may be said to be coeval with the law itself, should be restored to complete efficiency. The Commissioners of Inquiry have already shown in what manner this could be done, and pointed the way; but hitherto energy and authority have been wanting to surmount the opposition which corporate interests ever present to the progress of Reform. In our opinion. the same policy should be applied by Parliament to the Inns of Court which has brought about such important changes in the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. They should have a short term of grace allowed them to adopt for themselves a complete and efficient system of Legal Education, subject to the approval of competent Commissioners and of the Crown; because it is always preferable that reforms of this nature should be effected within the body they concern. But in the event of their failing in the discharge of these duties, their powers and their property should be vested in a Commission whose duty it would be to restore them to the important national objects for which alone they were originally designed. If this were done, we see no reason to suppose that it would be necessary to intrust the future education of our lawyers to any modern voluntary association, or to raise funds for that purpose by subscriptions or shares. The Inns of Court and of Chancery are the proper schools of Law of this country, and they should be compelled, if necessary, to restore and uphold the scientific and philosophical, as well as practical, knowledge of a noble profession, in which this country is so strangely and lamentably deficient.

ART. VIII.-1. Histoire de la Commune de Paris en 1871. Par SEMPRONIUS. Paris: 1871.

2. Paris Livré.

Par GUSTAVE FLOURENS. Paris: 1871.

3. Paris sous la Commune.

1871.

Par EDOUARD MORIAC. Paris:

4. The Civil War in France. Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association. London:

1871.

5. L'Internationale. Par OSCAR TESTU. Troisième édition. Paris: 1871.

OF

F all the revolutions of which Paris has been the theatre and the victim, none assuredly ever took her so much by surprise as that of the 18th of March. The public awoke one morning to find a new Government installed at the Hôtel de Ville, composed of men whose names, with the exception of those of Lullier and of Assi, were utterly unknown to the vast majority of Parisians. The general feeling at first was one of absolute stupefaction and bewilderment. An obscure faction, which had long been organising itself in secret with revolutionary aims but with no settled plan of revolution, found itself all at once in the unopposed possession of the most magnificent capital in Europe, with such an army, such fortifications, such fortresses, such an abundance of cannon and all war material, as no insurrection had ever held at its disposal since the beginning of the world. They were almost as much surprised themselves as the Government which they put to flight. For more than two months this insurrection carried on a revolt against the Government of France of a magnitude unparalleled in history. For more than two months they governed a population of two millions with a despotism more crushing than any Paris has ever known, until having by acts of violence and implacable fanaticism driven into exile or rendered hostile myriads of citizens who had yielded them at first a hesitating recognition, they were reduced to a band of desperadoes and fanatics, the blackest sediment of the everboiling revolutionary cauldron, who recruited their thinned ranks from the innumerable dens of vice and savagery which are the curses of large cities, placed arms and incendiary instruments in the hands of malefactors and convicts, did such deeds of colossal atrocity as convulsed the world with horror, and showed that they wanted not the will but only the power to involve the whole civilised world in their own ruin.

VOL. CXXXIV. NO. CCLXXIV.

LL

The elements of this insurrection are, no doubt, to be found in the various revolutions of 1793, 1830, 1848, in the coup d'état of 1852, in the corruption of the Second Empire, and, finally, in the Revolution of the 4th of September. The baleful prodigy, however, of whose disastrous vitality the world has lately had such astounding evidence, began its growth with the commencement of the siege of Paris by the Prussians, and showed its first signs of activity in the insurrections of the 31st of October and the 22nd of January. During the four long months of siege Paris was, to use the coarse expression of Bismarck, frying in its own gravy.' The malignant venom of civil disorder was, indeed, seething in the vitals of the city during the whole of these terrible winter months, when the people of Paris astonished the world by the resignation and capacity for sacrifice and endurance which they evinced amid the terrible privations of the siege; and that this insurrectionary evil did not break out before was owing to the unexpected patriotism and devotion to order shown by the immense majority of the inhabitants, who kept down the small and turbulent faction of the Reds.

The city, at the end of October of last year, had been already girdled in by Prussian batteries, and cut off from the whole civilised world for about six weeks as much as if it had been removed to another planet. About two millions of people had placed their safety and their honour in the hands of General Trochu. They believed implicitly in his word that he would never capitulate. There was, indeed, a little jesting about his plan, which he told the people he had deposited with his notary; but in the main it was believed that this plan was to save France, though the event proved the plan was merely a declaration that the siege was useless, and a final capitulation inevitable. Bazaine, le

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glorieux Bazaine,' as he was then called, was known to be still at Metz; and day by day it was hoped that he would break through the iron circle and march to the relief of Paris.

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Expectation was wrought up to the highest pitch, when on the 28th of October, there appeared in the Combat, the journal of Félix Pyat, these words in large letters, Trahison du Maréchal Bazaine,' with an announcement bordered with black lines, informing the public that Metz had surrendered. The public were struck aghast and dumb with the intelligence. There was a general rush to the Ministers. The Ministers declared they had no news of Bazaine. Bazaine had, however, already surrendered; and the secret had been betrayed by Rochefort to Flourens, who made it known to Félix Pyat.

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Three days later, on the 31st of October, two placards appeared on the walls of Paris; the one coolly announcing the surrender of Metz, and the other that M. Thiers was then engaged at Versailles in attempting to conclude an armistice. The whole city went wild with rage and excitement; the Government were again beset to know if the intelligence was true. This time, in fact, there was no use in denying the surrender, since the city gates were open in order to be able to communicate with M. Thiers, and all the inhabitants must have known of it in a day or two. Jules Ferry, the maire of Paris, in the place of Jules Favre, endeavoured to appease the people, who were furious at the conduct of the Ministers, and now cried for the Commune.

The cry for the Commune was even then not quite new to Paris; ever since the Revolution of the 4th of September, a small band of fanatics had declared that the establishment of the Commune was the only means of saving France. The chief strength of the Communal party lay among the white blouses' of Belleville, who, under their leaders Blanqui, Flourens, and Pyat, had been the terror of Paris under the Empire. Flourens had immense influence over these men, and he was the leading spirit of the insurrection of the 31st of October. Flourens was no vulgar agitator, and no ordinary character; he was a young man of thirty-two years of age; the son of the celebrated physiologist, formerly Secretary of the Académie des Sciences, popularly known as the author of the treatise Sur la Longévité humaine, and he has written his own account of the siege of Paris and the transactions in which he was engaged in a book entitled Paris livré. In private intercourse he was of engaging gentle manners; he was fair in features, and had a seductive smile

but with this quiet demeanour he had a passionate faith in revolution for revolution's sake. His courage was indisputable but it was of the most reckless kind; and he was prepared at any time, with the aid of a few carts, paving-stones, and bits of furniture, to raise a barricade, and to defend it with half a dozen followers against a whole army. His faith was, that a revolution, somehow or other, was to turn out for the benefit of the people, for whose amelioration he had a vague but genuine enthusiasm. His great ambition was to be, in revolutionary phrase, a man of action. His principle was that perpetual action of some kind, whether supported or not, was sure in the end of revolutionary success-a proposition which would be probably true if all the world was composed of men as reckless and as chimerical as himself. He was a man of con

siderable scientific and other acquirements; after having gone through a brilliant university career, and taken his degree in science, he filled for a short time the professorial chair of his father, and lectured at the Collège de France, under the Empire, but was obliged by the Government to resign on account of the revolutionary doctrines which he contrived to introduce into the lessons of science. Burning with fiery indignation at what he termed the shameful oppression of the Empire, he leagued himself with all the revolutionary spirits he could fall in with, became the friend of Rochefort, and later one of the contributors to the Marseillais. Obliged to fly from France, he threw himself heart and soul into the Cretan insurrection, and for a year fought with the Cretans in countless skirmishes in the mountains, living upon wild roots and boiled herbs, and his courage and example made such an impression on the Greeks that he was elected one of the deputies to the Athenian Chamber. After the suppression of the Cretan insurrection he took advantage of the amnesty to return to France; he played a part in the demonstration at the funeral of Victor Noir, and, contrary to the advice of Rochefort and Delescluze, was for marching unarmed upon Paris. His faith led him to believe that the army, being sons of the people, would join the revolution if the revolution would but display sufficient courage.

After a series of revolutionary plots and adventures in London, and anew in Greece, he arrived at Paris on the 8th of September, rushed at once to the Hôtel de Ville to find Rochefort, and explain to him his plan for saving France and the whole world besides. He embraced, to use a French phrase, the whole situation; some of his proposals were ra tional enough, though the whole formed an extravagant scheme. We confine ourselves to his notions of the foreign policy which the Government of the 4th of September should adopt:

'Abroad-to appeal immediately to the revolution; barricades at Berlin and Vienna; Spain, torn from the tyranny of Prim and launched boldly in republican paths; Garibaldi, aided with 20,000 men, guns, and money, should proclaim at Rome the Italian Republic; agents should be despatched to London to announce to an enslaved nation of workmen the new principles-the solidarity of peoples, and equality be tween all-and to cast to the ground the worm-eaten edifice of Norman feudalism. Since the Holy Alliance marched upon Paris to crush there the home of universal revolution, Paris must, by dint of daring, make the Holy Alliance recoil, and oblige it by a powerful diversion to return back and guard its own institutions.'

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