News and Miscellany

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 25, 1871

News and Miscellany.

“Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”

The Revolution in France.

The recent victories of the Commune but make darkness visible. The ultimate success of the revolutionists can only leave the future vague and uncertain, because their aim is vague and uncertain. Their courage and obstinacy tend to demoralize the troops of the Assembly, because those troops are Frenchmen. The fidelity of the latter to the Thiers government is weakened by their national sympathy, and that government is liable to see its soldiers desert in the very crisis of a battle. The army of the Assembly may possibly succeed in besieging Paris and compel a surrender, as they now threaten, but unless more generalship and bravery are displayed by the Versailles leaders and soldiers, the unsuspected resistance and the unsuspected courage of the “Reds,” are ominous for the stability of the Thiers government.

The distinction between the ideas and the conduct or character of the revolutionists, must be carefully kept in mind in estimating the merits of the conflicts. Though they whip priests and despoil convents, they do it by way of protest against the alliance between church and state. Though they pronounce all contracts between landlord and tenant null and void, and abolish the rights of property, they do it in the name of a vast association of workingmen, which extends all over Europe, and has for its object a universal republic, and a grand co-operative system of labor in which all shall be employers and employed. Though they rant and fume, yet their proclamations and papers show a high degree of intellectual ability, and they display a vigor and energy which the Thiers government has not shown, and probably does not possess.

Centralization based upon the ignorance of the masses, under whatever name, has been the principle underlying every form. In lieu of this the “Reds” have no distinct, organized principle to offer. Their constitution, if we can say that anarchy constitutes at all, is wholly negative. The “Commune,” they say, local self-government, equal distribution of the rewards of labor, upheaval of ancient traditions, the destruction of the church, the banishment of all who worship “a person whom they call God”; these and similarly destructive propositions form their “bill of rights” and wrongs.

If the South had successfully seceded, overthrown the Washington Government, withdrawn, and left the Northern States to pick themselves out of the wreck, we should have realized to some extent the situation of France after the surrender of Paris. Imagine us wholly to have forgotten the art of self-government, and to have been disgusted with the Federal Government which had so signally failed. Imagine the farmers of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and other States, daily anticipating that the populace of New York and other large cities, led by Wendell Phillips, Train, the Pennsylvania coal rioters, and men of less honesty and more capacity than they, would seize their property and divide the National and private wealth among the whole population. Imagine that these revolutionists had no charter, no constitution, no declarations of principles to offer; that they did not propose a republic like the one we had lost, nor a monarchy, nor even a confederation of the State Governments, but simply such a government as New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities might evolve from their own consciousness; imagine, if possible, these circumstances, and we begin to see a glimmer of the situation in France. We fall far short, even then, of the reality, because we cannot divest ourselves of our conscious ability to set up the machinery of local self-government at any place and under all circumstances. But France has never had this power. It is foreign to all its experience. It would know as little what to do with it, even if, by some miracle, it should be set running, as a Feejee would know what to do with a “postoffice, or the Esquimaux with a Supreme Court.—Detroit Post.