nse of relief, and the material ruin now constitutes the least horror
in the scene. It is sufficiently distressing to picture every Quarter of
the great Capital, which but the other day was the beauty of the world,
scarred by conflagrations, torn by shells, pitted with musketry, and
stained with blood. It is terrible to think that in a city "like Paris"
fire and sword, and instruments of destruction still more hellish, have
swept from West to East, and from South to North; that most of its noble
palaces are but gaunt and blackened walls, and its finest streets laid
in heaps of as utter ruin as the mounds of Nineveh. The mind is
overwhelmed by the mere physical spectacle of this whirlwind of blazing
destruction suddenly bursting over a noble city so near us, which we
knew so well, and the inhabitants of which were but yesterday our
neighbours and our friends. But even this is overpowered by the awful
human ruin which it expresses and reflects. On both sides alike we hear
of incredible acts of assassination and slaughter. The Insurgents have
fulfilled, so far as they were able, their threats against the lives of
their hostages as mercilessly as their other menaces. The Archbishop of
PARIS, the Cure of the Madeleine, President BONJEAN, with priests,
gendarmes, soldiers, and other victims to the number of 64, have been
shot, and 168 others were only saved by the arrival of the troops. This
massacre of distinguished and inoffensive men is one of those crimes
which never die, and which blacken for ever the memory of their authors.
But in the spirit of murder and hatred it displays the Communists seem
not very much worse than their antagonists. It sounds like trifling for
M. THIERS to be denouncing the Insurgents for having shot a captive
officer "without respect for the laws of war." The laws of war! They are
mild and Christian compared with the inhuman laws of revenge under which
the Versailles troops have been shooting, bayoneting, ripping up
prisoners, women and children, during the last six days. We have not a
word to say for the black ruffians who, it is clear, deliberately
planned the utter destruction of Paris, the burning of its inhabitants,
and the obliteration of its treasures; but if soldiers will convert
themselves into fiends in attacking fiends, is it any wonder if they
redouble the fiendishness of the struggle? Fury has inflamed fury, and
hate has embittered hate, until all the wild passions of the human heart
ha