The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎92v] (189/244)

674
THE NINETEENTH
April
Finance Committee, where they will continue to give the service
they have previously rendered and which every member appreciates
at its right value. It is absolutely untrue that their positions have
been vacated, and it is equally a misstatement to say that their new
colleagues ' are men elected not for their intelligence but for their
political partisanship.' The new men appear to be quite equal to the
old in ability and municipal influence; and the dire results of Mr.
Prothero's pessimistic prediction will not be realised, as there is every
reason to believe that the new members will devote as much time
and administrative capacity to their new and arduous duties as did
the old.
The next objection to my article is its title. Here again my
critic appears to have been influenced by the wild tribe of shrieking
journalists, who have surrounded a good name socially expressive,
municipally comprehensive, and historically correct, with all the wild
phantasms of plunder, brigandage, and bacchanalian debauchery that
twenty-one years ago they unjustly associated with the Commune of
Paris.
The collective, social, imaginative, and artistic instincts of the
Paris workmen evolved order and system out of the cowardly and
maladministrative anarchy in which the Imperialists had involved
Paris before and during the siege. With enemies at the gates,
and traitors within them, they attempted and, to a great extent,
succeeded in establishing at the barricade, in their protest against
Imperial centralised bureaucracy, that revolution in decentralised
government and civic control of which by the ballot-box in London
an instalment has been secured by the vote of London's craftsmen.
A commune means to me, as it meant to the workers of Paris, a
free city in a free country—a community possessing all the powers
of a free people for its civic, social, physical, and artistic development,
uncontrolled by any power other than that to which it voluntarily
consents. As De Tocqueville says, ' It is in the commune that the
force of a free people resides.' It means London governed and ad
ministered by the openly elected of its choice, unhampered by the
merely proprietary and predatory instincts of ground landlords, who,
having plundered the rurals of their common lands, now with a malign
unanimity conspire with an uncultured, inartistic, traditionless
bourgeoisie of rentiers and monopoly capitalists to escape their
municipal obligations. These people, with their inanimate wealth,
wwh to outvote and outweigh the clamant needs of the millions
of sentient human beings whose interests must be guarded, and
whose future social, artistic, and industrial life can be, and must be,
improved by a democratic municipality.
Mr. Prothero, with the object, I presume, of frightening the
ratepayers, jumps at fictitious conclusions, and skips fro m the com
mune of his imagination to the more imaginary cost of maintaining