There was a large store of petroleum at the barracks of the Château d'Eau, in connexion with which this order was found on a National Guard, a chief of a barricade: The citizen ' delegate commanding the barracks of the Château d'Eau is 'invited to give the bearer the cans of mineral oil necessary for the chief of barricades of the Faubourg du Temple.' Signed Brunel, Chef de Légion. There was, in fact, a band of fuséens formed of the reprobates, worst women, and vagrant boys of each district, for burning the quarter, of which the following order, signed by Delescluze, Régère, Ranvier, Johannard, Vesinier, Brunel, and Dombrowski, is testimony: this also is dated the 23rd: The citizen Millière, with 150 'fuséens, will burn the suspected houses and public monu'ments of the left bank. The citizen Dereure, with 100 "fuséens, will undertake the 1st and 2nd arrondissements. The citizen Billioray, with 100 fuséens, is charged with the 9th, 10th, and 20th arrondissements."

The result of these orders was, that not only were the splendid edifices burnt whose names are known to all the world, but about two thousand private houses besides. Indeed, as the insurgents were driven back step by step within Paris, they only retired leaving ghastly ruin everywhere behind them. By the side of all the formidable barricades with which the many streets of Paris were intersected, were seen piled heaps of incendiary materials which the National Guard carried with them into the houses which they occupied in the vicinity, and when they found they had to retreat they ordered the inhabitants to assist them in daubing the walls and floors with petroleum, and if they refused shot them or threw them into the flames. In the burning houses in the Rue Royale a series of these horrible dramas were perpetrated, which were renewed in almost all quarters of the city. One of the most frightful of these scenes took place on the 25th in the Boulevard Saint Martin, between the theatre of that name and the Théâtre de l'Ambigu. The insurgents massacred all the inhabitants, women and children included, of every floor in the house, because in the general pillage and havoc which they were making of the premises one of the band got a blow from an indignant proprietor. They then set fire to the building and to the neighbouring theatre, which was one of the most popular in Paris.

These explosions of incendiary revenge added a new and awful element of terror to the sensations of such unfortunate inhabitants of Paris as witnessed the last terrible days of the Commune. For nearly two months nerve and brain had been

tortured by the incessant thunder of cannon which raged all around the city and shook the houses from roof to basement. Abandoned to the fury of civil war, and distracted ever and anon by constantly recurring crises of agonising suspense, the capital, in spite of the furious frenzy which ruled supreme, had presented for the most part a ghastly aspect of solitude and desolation. The Boulevards and the Champs Elysées, which the visitor is accustomed to see thronged with gay and light-hearted multitudes, were as deserted ofttimes in broad day as a city at dead of night, and as barren of life as the Great Sahara itself. Along the immense causeways, void of traffic and of the usual trains of elegant equipages, the most frequent signs of activity were the battalions of the National Guard ever marching to the scene of conflict, and accompanied in their march by groups of terrified wives who clung to their husbands to say perhaps a last farewell, and frequent mourning processions, headed by the coffins of citizens slain in civil war, draped around with the red flags of the Commune, and followed by weeping women and troops of comrades with arms reversed, wended their way daily through the desolate streets to the suburban cemeteries. This prolonged epoch of misery, fear, madness, and desolation was at last broken up by the unexpected entrance of the troops of Versailles, and the supreme moment which all had held so long in dread had arrived, that of civil conflict in the streets. For two days and one night the inhabitants of the chief thoroughfares of western Paris lived under an ever-raging storm of shot and shell; the roar of cannon, the fierce, harsh growl of the mitrailleuse, and the running fire of musketry was now close around them. The inhabitants of many houses were so taken by surprise that they had omitted to lay in provisions, and the baker's or the butcher's shop a few doors off was, with the torrent of deadly missiles which swept up and down the streets, as inaccessible as if it had been in another hemisphere.

In the midst of a multitudinous city hundreds of families seemed as cut off from all help from human kind as if they had been in a ship at sea in the centre of a typhoon. Nothing was to be done amid the infernal uproar but to remain behind closed shutters and doors and wait. The appearance of a curious. head at a window was sufficient to draw a shower of bullets in its direction; so women sat away in remote corners, even in the cellars; and the hours seemed interminable, even to the bravest, till the cries of Vive la ligne! in the street announced that the neighbouring barricade was carried, and that the reign of the Commune was over in that locality. It was no marvel

that the inhabitants should at once all rush into the street to verify the reality of deliverance, and that strangers should congratulate each other on the end of so much misery; but the unceasing thunder of civil war was going on a street or two off, and days yet were to pass before it was to cease altogether. However, people gave themselves up to the rapture of the feeling of safety and freedom for a time. But it did not last long; for the arrival of dusk revealed such an aspect of the whole south-eastern sky as filled the air with a fresh terror. One lurid canopy of fire seemed to be impending over and about to engulph the entire city. People rushed wildly to the tops of houses, or to such open spaces as were accessible, to get a view of the new portent; for hemmed in as they were still by the murderous front of civil war it was perilous to go far from one's quarters. To those who could get a view of the conflagration, whole quarters of the city seemed in flames, and the fire to be gaining strength and approaching at every moment. People remembered then despairingly the reiterated threats of the Commune, that they would lay all Paris in ashes at their fall.

The Red Commune, it seemed, was keeping its word; it would die in a sea of blood and under a canopy of fire. The stricken crowds stood gazing with sickening hearts at the awful light reflected in the heavens, and turning their lurid faces on each other muttered in low voices their worst fears and suspicions. It was said that the regiment of firemen had been dismissed, and the hoses of the fire-engines destroyed, for this eventuality; and there were whisperings that whole quarters were mined, and that it wanted but the spark of an electric wire to lay them in ruins. And when the worn-out inhabitants retired to rest they felt a horrible dread, which surpassed that which beset them the night before when they tried to rest amid the crash of mitrailleuses and the roar of cannon. On the following day set in the panic of the pétroleuses; a name coined for the occasion, which was soon in the mouths of all. Whether such women as the imagination pictured to itself dark female fiends, gliding furtively about from street to street and dropping petroleum and incendiary chemical compounds down into cellars and into open crevices in doors and shutters-did at all exist, we have as yet no proof, but certain it is that they were universally believed in, and that hundreds of innocent creatures were taken as such and summarily shot. If a poor woman were caught with even a cruse of oil she was in danger of her life. Imagination, indeed. makes revengeful cowards of multitudes in insurrectionary

times in Paris, and is terribly inventive. It has been proved that a great part of the atrocities laid to the charge of the insurgents of the terrible days of June 1848 were pure inventions; and such inventions were of frightful frequency in the days during and succeeding the suppression of the Commune, and served to exasperate the minds of the people, and intensify the thirst for vengeance, which was already insatiable enough. The atrocities of the Commune, however, were sufficiently diabolical without calling in the aid of fiction; and their dying fit of incendiary rage increased a hundredfold the horrors which attended the suppression of the revolt. History will never, probably, be able to give an account of the number of innocent victims who perished at their hands, and the number of those who became involved in their ruin was greater still. Paris, for a few days, was one immense field of slaughter and a veritable charnel-house; and amid the enormous number of prisoners taken and shot without judgment, numbers of guiltless people must have perished. Indeed, in the hour of victory, the baser and more malignant passions of human nature broke loose in a way which makes one forget somewhat the barbarities which had been the occasion for their display. People who had either submitted to the reign of the Commune, or coalesced with it, to show their innocence urged on the troops to the massacre of their prisoners, and private enmity made use of every form of cowardly anonymous denunciation, of which hundreds were received by the military and police every day. Women and children were heard horribly to exult over the constant reports of the executions, without judgment, of masses of prisoners, and the verb fusiller was repeated with satisfaction in almost every breath.

But the horrors of the closing scenes of the Commune were so great as to be both painful to the memory and not suitable for detailed description; while the political and moral lessons to be drawn from them are not of such interest as those which are to be drawn from a consideration of its origin and of its earlier phases. After hostilities had been commenced, it was necessary perhaps that the fratricidal folly and intolerance which provoked the conflict should pursue it to its awful end; but it would be a slander on the order of the world to say that a catastrophe which does dishonour to humanity might not have been avoided.

ART. IX.-1. Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Session 1871.

2. Report from the Select Committee on Public Business in the House of Commons. August 1848.

3. Report from the Joint Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Despatch of Public and Private Business in Parliament. August 1869.

4. Report from the Select Committee on Business of the House of Commons. March 1871.

TH

HE physical year has been one of unusual character. It has been the cause of anxious hopes and fears to all whose interests depend upon the influence of the seasons. A frosty winter was followed by a tardy spring; a cold and ungenial summer brought heavy rainfalls and violent gusts, relieved by few and fitful bursts of sunshine. The harvest has indeed been late, but, forced on at the last by sudden heat, not so late as had been anticipated. The principal grain crop may not have fully realised the farmer's desire, yet it has proved a substantial and valuable yield. Of the other products of the soil, although some have disappointed hope, the majority have been satisfactorily garnered; while the progress of that important factor in agricultural economy, the root crop, gives good promise for the future.

The season of the political has borne a close resemblance to that of the physical year. It has been marked by abnormal features, it has been fitful and gloomy, and the source of alarm and disappointment. It has had its failures and its shortcomings, yet its fruits, though matured late, and reaped at the last in hot haste and at the cost of extraordinary exertions, will be admitted, on a deliberate survey, to have been neither deficient in quantity nor, in the majority of instances, wanting in quality, while even among those that have not been gathered in, more than one has been advanced to a point which affords fair hope of an early success.

There is, however, this difference to be observed that while the returns of the year to the husbandman's toil are freely and gratefully recognised, the fruits of the political year are depreciated or ignored. That the Tories and other opponents of the Government should act after their kind is but natural, that many true and earnest Liberals should feel annoyance and disappointment is, after much that has taken place, to be expected. In the interest, however, of Liberal principles, and for the credit of the party, we must protest against indulgence in that