arrests and shooting. Marx replies to “the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press” and to the reproaches of the “well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires,” in connection with the repressive measures of the Commune in the following words:– ”Not satisfied with their open waging of a most bloodthirsty war against Paris, the Versaillese strove secretly to gain an entry by corruption and conspiracy. Could the Commune at such a time without shamefully betraying its trust, have observed the customary forms of liberalism, just as if profound peace reigned around it? Had the government of the Commune been akin in spirit to that of Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress newspapers of the party of order in Paris than there was to suppress newspapers of the Commune at Versailles.” In this way, what Kautsky demands in the name of the sacred foundations of democracy Marx brands as a shameful betrayal of trust.
Concerning the destruction of which the Commune is accused, and of which now the Soviet Government is accused, Marx speaks as of “an inevitable and comparatively insignificant episode in the titanic struggle of the newborn order with the old in its collapse.” Destruction and cruelty are inevitable in any war. Only sycophants can consider them a crime “in the war of the slaves against their oppressors, the only just war in history” (Marx.) Yet our dread accuser Kautsky, in his whole book, does not breathe a word of the fact that we are in a condition of perpetual revolutionary self-defence, that we are waging an intensive war against the oppressors of the world, the “only just war in history. ”
Kautsky yet again tears his hair because the Soviet Government, during the Civil War, has made use of the severe method of taking hostages. He once again brings forward pointless and dishonest comparisons between the fierce Soviet Government and the humane Commune. Clear and definite in this connection sounds the opinion of Marx. “When Thiers, from the very beginning of the conflict, had enforced the humane practice of shooting down captured Communards, the Commune, to