nt?"

Possibly Mr. Hodgkin is right. The manner in which the leaders of the
Paris Commune dealt with the rights of property during their disastrous,
but fortunately very brief, period of office in 1871, serves as a
warning of what, in an extreme case, may be expected of despotic
democracy in its most aggravated form. Moreover, misgovernment, and the
fiscal oppression which is the almost necessary accompaniment of
militarism dominant over a poverty-stricken population, have latterly
developed on the continent of Europe, and more especially in Italy, a
school of action--for anarchism can scarcely be dignified by the name of
a school of thought--which regards human life as scarcely more sacred
than property. It may be that some lower depth has yet to be reached,
although it is almost inconceivable that such should be the case.
Anarchy takes us past the stage of any defined political or social
programme. It would appear, so far as can at present be judged, to
embody the last despairing cry of ultra-democracy "Furens."

It is permissible to hope that our national sobriety, coupled with the
inherited traditions derived from centuries of free government, will
save us from such extreme manifestations of democratic tyranny as those
to which allusion has been made above. The special danger in England
would appear rather to arise from the probability of gradual dry rot,
due to prolonged offence against the infallible and relentless laws of
economic science. Both British employers of labour and British workmen
are insular in their habits of thought, and insular in the range of
their acquired knowledge. They do not appear as yet to be thoroughly
alive to the new position created for British trade by foreign
competition. It is greatly to be hoped that they will awake to the
realities of the situation before any permanent harm is done to British
trade, for the loss of trade involves as its ultimate result the
pauperisation of the proletariat, the adoption of reckless expedients
based on the _Panem et Circenses_ policy to fill the mouths and quell
the voices of the multitude, and finally the suicide of that Empire
which is the offspring of trade, and which can only continue to exist so
long as its parent continues to thrive and to flourish.

5. _The Destruction of the Middle Class by the Fiscal Oppression of the
Curiales._--Leaving aside points of detail, which were only of special
application to the circumstances of the time, this c