And let us not forget that for the inhabitants of a revolted
territory, "foreign parts" may include all districts that have not
joined in the revolutionary movement. During the Revolutions of 1793 and
1871 Paris was made to feel that "foreign parts" meant even the country
district at her very gates. The speculator in grains at Troyes starved
in 1793 and 1794 the sansculottes of Paris as badly, and even worse,
than the German armies brought on to French soil by the Versailles
conspirators. The revolted city will be compelled to do without these
"foreigners," and why not? France invented beet-root sugar when
sugar-cane ran short during the continental blockade. Parisians
discovered saltpetre in their cellars when they no longer received any
from abroad. Shall we be inferior to our grandfathers, who hardly lisped
the first words of science?

A revolution is more than a mere change of the prevailing political
system. It implies the awakening of human intelligence, the increasing
of the inventive spirit tenfold, a hundredfold; it is the dawn of a new
science--the science of men like Laplace, Lamarck, Lavoisier. It is a
revolution in the minds of men, as deep, and deeper still, than in their
institutions.

And there are still economists, who tell us that once the "revolution is
made," everyone will return to his workshop, as if passing through a
revolution were going home after a walk in the Epping forest!

To begin with, the sole fact of having laid hands on middle-class
property will imply the necessity of completely reorganizing the whole
of economic life in the workshops, the dockyards, the factories.

And the revolution surely will not fail to act in this direction. Should
Paris, during the social revolution, be cut off from the world for a
year or two by the supporters of middle-class rule, its millions of
intellects, not yet depressed by factory life--that City of little
trades which stimulate the spirit of invention--will show the world what
man's brain can accomplish without asking for help from without, but the
motor force of the sun that gives light, the power of the wind that
sweeps away impurities, and the silent life-forces at work in the earth
we tread on.

We shall see then what a variety of trades, mutually cooperating on a
spot of the globe and animated by a revolution, can do to feed, clothe,
house, and supply with all manner of luxuries millions of intelligent
men.

We need write no fiction to prov