LOUISE MICHEL.
THE cruel sentence passed this week upon the Parisian lecturer, Louise Michel, for inciting the people to plunder bakers' shops, calls attention once more to that curious puzzle, the difference in the development of the passion of pity in Eng- land and on the Continent. The passion certainly exists here, as witness, for a single illustration, Mr. Plimsoll. Apart alto- gether from the multitudes of religious men and women who devote themselves to good 'works, there must be hundreds of persons in our midst who, without strong religious convictions, occasionally with very strong agnostic convictions, devote them- selves, their lives, and their fortunes to the poor, out of sheer compassion. They have nothing to gain, not even reputation, but they work on steadily for years. They realise the suffer- ings of the poor so completely that they cannot rest unless they are battling strenuously with some evil, poverty, or disease, or ignorance, or intemperance, for their sake. They very often feel the pressure of such evils so painfully that idleness seems to them wickedness, the enjoyment of wealth a cruelty, and any departure from the law of abstinence in drinking, and even, though rarely, in eating, an immorality. We have known them abstain from carpets, lest they should forget what bare floors meant. Such men, and more women, often grow heated in the endless contest, lose sight of the proportion of things, and begin to re- gard cool judgment as evidence of callousness. They dream and brood until the impossible becomes easy to their minds. We have often been startled to hear persons whose whole lives were an honour to Christianity, and who possessed for all purposes of charity a true faculty of organisation, gravely defend pro- posals to which Parliament would scarcely give a hearing, pro- posals involving sometimes plunder, sometimes the abrogation of parental rights, sometimes the extinction of liberty absolutely essential to the national character. We have heard it gravely suggested that a five-shilling income-tax should be devoted to the poor, that the people should be rehoused by the confiscation of all legacies above £10,000; that all children should be taken from their parents to bring up "properly," and that marriage should be prohibited to all who do not receive at least a pound a week. The total prohibition of the sale of liquor is one of their common-places, and so is the compulsory despatch of babies to the creche. But those who suggest such things, furious as they often are, and full of anger with classes and individuals, are rarely or never cruel. They do not wish to injure anybody. It has been our lot to listen to most kinds of English philan- thropists, when most thoroughly in eartiest, but except once in regard to slavery, and once in regard to vivisection, we never remember to have heard cruelty advocated, and never acquired an idea of the speaker having any secret sympathy with riot or insurrection. The pity seemed to extend to all classes, and a proposal to "card" the Duke of Westminster would have excited as much horror as did the condition of any labouring family in a London slum, or the oppression of any agriculttfral labourer_ On the Continent, it is not so. There exists there in almost every country a class of philanthropists in whom a passion of pity for the "dim, common populations," for their sufferings, for their toil, for their want of food, seems to overpower not only the judgment, but even the moral sense. Some- times wealthy, often cultivated, they become filled with hatred against those who, as they think, oppose their re- forms, till they would confiscate all the property of the rich, banish all priests, and kill out all who would defend laws for the protection of either. Like Louise Michel, they do not object to dynamite or assassination, if all other means fail, and suspect those who do object of a secret half-heartedness in their horror of human suffering. There is no reason to doubt the evidence given by M. Rochefort as to Louise's devotion th the wretched women whom she found on board ship or in New Caledonia. He was not in a rhetorical mood, and his evidence is quite of a, piece with all that has ever been recorded of her life,—with her devotion to her mother, her toil to give to the poor, her anxious and faithful attendance upon the wretched. She is by the testimony of her quartier a Sister of Mercy, without uniform or vow. Yet the Judges who hear these things hear her also justify the plunder of bakers' shops, receive evidence showing that she threatens fire and sword at the next social uprising, and deem her from her past history as Communist a dangerous revolutionary character, who would, were the needful circumstances to occur, order a great massacre. They are as right as M. Rochefort. She is, in fact, a woman in whom the passion of pity has transformed her blood to gall,
who hates oppressors, real or fancied, more than she loves the oppressed, and who has forgetton to consider the morality of means, if only she may arrive rapidly at benevolent ends. An English newspaper sneers at her reluctance to hear M. Rochefort give testimony to her virtues, as savouring of mock-modesty, but it is most probable that the reluctance was real, though it had nothing to do with modesty at all. Louise was simply impatient as she said, of such a fact as her pity for the poor being brought forward as an argument in her favour. It was, to her mind, a necessary fact of her life, with no relation to the charge, and she might as well have been defended by a plea that she had dark or light hair. She despised such pleas, maintaining not that she was benevolent—which was to her a detail of no moment— but that it was positively right, if people were hungry, to incite them to take bread out of bakers' shops. She would not take it for herself, but she would incite them, that being; as she holds, a right thing to do. She would, in fact, levy war for the poor, and if the rich perished in the war, that was their fault, for being rich. •
It is very • difficult to think out the cause of a difference like this, for it does not arise either from comparative ignorance or from any feature of national character. Louise Michers opinions are those of scores as educated as Elis6e Reclus, that is, twice as educated as are most of our own philanthropists. They are repeated in Germany by men as Teutonic as the English, the latter again, if properly-provoked, being quite capable of becoming bigots. A little of the difference may be due to the Poor-law, which by taking actual starvation out of the list of probabilities, greatly, though unconsciously, relieves the philanthropic imagi- nation. A little more, too, may be ascribed to the English want of logic, their refusal to draw the deduction that though a landlord may be harsh, and being harsh is starving his tenants, he, there- fore, deserves death. But the main reason, we suspect, is the old one that on the Continent the philanthropists are the religious- minded, and that the religions-minded, when they have no religion, supply its place with a Cause. Thenceforward, the Cause being heartily adopted, its opponents are the wicked, to be suppressed out of the way. As, till the Revolution arrives, there is no means of suppressing them except force, the philanthro- pists justify force as being, on the whole, better than the further toleration of immorality. Of course, a great deal of actual passion, unreasoning and cruel passion, enters into the matter too, for the battle heats the blood; but the conscious theory is as we have stated it, and we can give this farther evidence. The philanthropists who have a faith, the leading members, for example, of the Society.of St. Vincent de Paul, who are often quite fanatical for the poor, never display this cruelty, or attempt to stir up the people to insurrection. The agnostic philan- thropists, on the other hand, are, in their own eyes, a Government legislating and acting to remove an evil; and their opponents, being evil, have no more right to demur than thieves have a right to demur when the law lays hold of them. That the law calls their agents thieves or assassins has nothing to do with the matter, except to increase the necessity for doing away with law. It seems no more binding to them than the Smugglers' Code same binding to Supervisors of Excise. They have developed a morality which inverts everything, their own position, that of their agents, and that of their opponents, and which strikes those who believe the old one as half mad and half bad, or, if the latter are Philistine as well as Christian, as entirely mad. It is bad and it is mad, but it is a morality, and the difficulty of dealing with those who hold it is one of the problems of modern jurisprudence. The mind revolts at a sentence such as was passed on Louise Michel—of six years' imprisonment, and ten more years' surveillance—as a monstroue cruelty, her offence, at most, being that of a ringleader in a trumpery bread riot, which in England would have been punished with three months', or at most six months' imprisonment. Yet what were the Judges to do ? What sentence, except a lengthened imprisonment, could they inflict on a woman who avowed anarchical designs, and who they felt certain would, on the day of her release, incite the people again? The true remedy would be a kindly reclusion until the culprit had become more reasonable, but the Judges could not inflict it, and they availed themselves therefore of Louise Michel's position as a relapsed convict to confine her for the longest possible term. The only effect is to discredit justice, and to make new horrors possible in revenge ; but the legislators have not yet founded a political Gheel, a city specially reserved for the kindly guardianship of all who are politically mad.
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