South Canterbury Times. MONDAY, APRIL 2, 1883.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3119, 2 April 1883, Page 2

South Canterbury Times. MONDAY, APRIL 2, 1883.

The arrest by the French Government of Louise Michel, the returned Communiste, is a step at which most people will rejoice, and on the prudence and decisiveness of which the Republic is to be congratulated. It is with considerable anxiety that the friends of Republicanism everywhere have watched its newest development in France. Many and dire were the predictions concerning its fate. The past history of France is so fall of episodes of turbulence and anarchy that it appeared impossible to realise that she should ever be fit to enjoy the advantages of a free people. The art of governing France was either to keep her in good humor with displays and ornament or to keep her silent by flourishing a sword in front of her ; she had either to be tickled into laughter or whipped into submission. Of political science there was none ; of political sentiment, far too much. Political education in Prance meant factional devotion—the faction first, the country after. No people could be more unprepared for republicanism, which of all forms of Government is the one which depends most upon the intelligence of the governed for its stability. It is literally the people governing their own common weal, a voluntary system from which compulsion has been altogether banished. In the course of the last ten years, however, a remarkable change had been wrought in Prance. The disasters of the Franco-Prussiau war, the disclosure of the abuses of the Government of the Third Empire, the taste of commercial prosperity, of peace and international trade which the country had during a few years, had caused the trading classes (comprehending of course an enormous number) to perceive the advantages of tranquility and serious Government, and these desired nothing more than to be governed in a free, common-sense, practical manner. Hence the infant republic was bom under auspicious circumstances. But in the fair picture there was a dark spot. Many of the fiery agitators, the Communists, who had wrought such fearful havoc in Paris immediately after the Prussian war during the reign of the Commune, had been deported to New Caledonia, and a crowd of others slunk back into their native obscurity. By and by, as their sentences expired, some of the banished ones, with hatred and bitterness in their hearts after a long period of incarceration, returned to their country with the purpose of again setting her aflame with revolution. These were welcomed with extraordinary fervour by their brethren of the back slums, and a, considerable array of malcontents were now ready to break out in slaughter, vandalism, and outrage, with the self-same weapons as before. First Henry Rochfort, who was not extreme enough, however, and then Louise Michel—probably the most dangerous of the many, dangerous firebrands—a woman, daring, eloquent, fervid, with . a heated imagination opening up before her excited eye fantastic visions of an emancipated people, exulting over the destruction of all that was pure, noble, or orderly. This she-devil, on landing in Paris from her bondage, is received with demonstrations of welcome, her cab is, drawn by the mob, the “ Marseillaise ” resounds from the thousand throats and she begins a lecturing tour through the country, the centre of a malcontent section. At length it culminates the other day in a revolutionary outbreak of the old type—a barricade was hastily thrown up, and preparation made for a shindy, such as the Parisian mob doth love. In the midst, Mademoiselle Louise, charming Communiste, mounted a ladder and addressed her brethren of the oppressed people. Happily a gendarme politely banded her down and conducted her to the seclusion of the watch-house. “Get thee to a nunnery,” would be useless to Mademoiselle probably, she having most likely renounced dogma—but if she does not go into conventual retirement, she most assuredly ought to be kept within walls, and it is to be hoped she has now made her last bow to the people.