A NOVEL IDEA.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2228, 19 April 1881, Page 2

A NOVEL IDEA.

The latest idea of revolutionary Paris is Louise Michel’s proposition to bring forward dead candidates, seeing that there are no longer among the living men worthy to represent the electors. “Dead candidates,” says Louise Michel, “are at once a flag and a revindication. They are the purest expression of the Social Revolution—an idea which can never be assailed nor destroyed—an idea invincible and implacable as death. The illegal candidature is just. The dead candidature is as great as the Revolution itself.” Wild as the notion is of nominating the dead, it is not now suggested for the first time, No contrast could be greater than that which exists between the famous potroleuse who is now stirring Montmartre and the American humorist who created Artemus Ward ; but it was the humorist and not the revolutionist who first suggested the “ dead candidature.” Writing during the war with the Southern Slates, he complained in his curious stylo that there was no statesman in Congress who could “ rise up to the emergency and cave in the emergency’s head,” and then forestalled Louise Miohol by saying : “At a special Congressional ’lection in my district the other day I delib’retly voted for Henry Olay. I admit that Henry is dead, but inasmuch as wo don’t seem to have a live statesman in our National Congress, let us by all means have a first-class corpse."