after a mock trial were taken to a walled enclosure
and shot down in cold blood. They were the first victims of the mob,
which had early begun to burn its bridges behind it.

On the following day the leaders of the outbreak met at the
Hotel-de-Ville. They all belonged to the International, a secret society
formed for the abolition of property, religion, rulers, government, and
the upper classes, and the reduction of the community to a state of
anarchy or something resembling it. They called upon the citizens to
meet in their sections and elect a commune--the new form of government
advocated by the Anarchists, in which destruction of all existing
institutions was to precede reconstruction from the bottom upwards.

Events now moved rapidly. A delegation from the few men of note left in
Paris proceeded to Versailles, where the government of the republic was
in session, and demanded that special municipal rights should be given
to the people of Paris. The refusal of this request precipitated the
insurrection. The furious people at once elected a revolutionary
government, choosing the most extreme of the revolutionists, who
organized what was called the Council of the Commune. This consisted of
eighty members, of varied nationality, seventy of them never having been
heard of in Paris before. They had risen from the bottom of the deep sea
of anarchy to assume control.

On the 3d of April the civil war broke out--Paris against Versailles,
the army under the Assembly of the republic against the National Guard
in sympathy with the Commune. The Germans, who still held two of the
forts in the vicinity of Paris, looked grimly on at the tragedy about to
be played upon the stage which their hands had erected.

The war began with murder. Dr. Pasquier, a distinguished surgeon,
bearing a flag of truce, met two National Guards on the bridge of
Courbevoie, near Neuilly, where the body of Napoleon had been brought
ashore thirty years before. After a brief debate one of the soldiers
ended the colloquy by blowing out the doctor's brains. As soon as
General Vinoy, in command of the army of order, heard of this murderous
act he ordered the guns of Fort Varelien to be turned upon the city.

On the following morning five columns of the troops of the Commune
marched out to take the fort, lured by the confident impression that the
soldiers under Vinoy would fraternize with them. They were mistaken. The
guns of Fort Varelien hurled death-deali