THE PARIS COMMUNE IN AMERICA.
We shall not be accounted alarmists for quoting the following warning from the columns of the redoubtable champion of the Democratic party, the New York World: “That the anniversary of the outbreak in Paris of the Commune, which startled the civilized world with its fruits of murder, sacrilege, incendiarism, rapine, cruelty, and cowardice,—which massacred priests, magistrates, and guardians of the public peace, and raised galley-slaves and thieves to absolute command over the fairest capital of modern times,—has come to be publicly feted in New York as Americans celebrate the birthday of Washington or the great day of our national independence, is a thing to give even this thoughtless capital pause. “The French Communists who have fled hither across the sea have changed their sky but not their mind. They not only do not repent of deeds done abroad at which humanity shuddered, but they actually avow their desire and intention, if ever occasion serves them, to repeat those deeds in the land in which they have found an asylum; and while Americans who hold positions of responsibility and influence are lending these men countenance, the great body of the citizens of New York submit in apathetic indifference to a local despotism which, by its extravagance and its corruption, is daily manufacturing that raw material of public and private insolvency out of which Communism has in all ages and in all lands been developed. “Citizen John Swinton and the native American idealists who think with him may believe—we hope they do believe—that when they assent to such doctrines as Citizen Megy (the commander of the firing party which massacred Archbishop Darboy and the other hostages) preaches and take part in his banquets they are not instigating a repetition here of the Commune of 1871, and are doing nothing to make such a repetition possible. But all history shows that it is precisely such men who by precisely such sympathy bring about outbreaks at which they stand aghast, which they are powerless to control, and of which they have not seldom been themselves the earliest victims. Citizen Megy takes the ground that the artisan’s condition is becoming intolerable in America, and that it is his duty and sacred privilege to mend it by revolution. He holds, precisely as hundreds of men in what are called the ‘better classes’ of society now do, that our ‘institutions’ are a failure; that corruption and tyranny cannot be overthrown by the ballot or the existing machinery of our politics. The overthrow and breaking-up of the whole existing fabric of society by force and the partition among those who have not of the goods of those who have,—these are the short and simple methods of reform which he contemplates. “That there are people in every crowded community in this country prepared to listen to this gospel of hate and chaos, who can doubt when he recalls the scenes which disgraced Pittsburg less than a year ago? Now that we have drilled preachers proposing to repeat these scenes systematically and as means to an end, is it not worth while to think what the phenomenon means and what it demands? New Yorkers at least cannot close their eyes to this revelation. While we have among us the lighted firebrand in the shape of these flaming Communists, and the magazine of combustibles in the ‘suffering’ and therefore ‘dangerous’ classes, our abominable municipal misgovernment is steadily bringing the two together. The Roman plebs of which Macaulay sings were not condemned to greater sufferings than our laboring men and their families endure under the regime of Tammany, which crushes all decency and comfort out of their lives by the squalor in which it leaves them to live, and by its neglect of all sanitary conditions, fattens the soil of the Potter’s Field with their dead. The misgovernment of Tammany weighs most heavily upon the workingman. It is upon him that by natural law the greatest weight of the burdens of taxation must forever fall. The regime of Tammany in New York was intended by its authors in the time of Tweed to be a regime of oppression, injustice, and lawlessness. What it was intended to be it was and it is. It is identical in principle, though it bears another name, with the regimes which bred the Jacquerie, and the Reign of Terror, and Commune of Paris. The man who preaches the destruction of law and the man who corrupts the laws are fellows in one evil work. In the eye of reason John Kelly completes Edmond Megy and is an essential co-worker with him.”—The Christian Statesman.