ve been fused into one vast and indistinguishable conflagration.

So far as we can recollect there has been nothing like it in history.
The siege of Jerusalem may afford some parallel, but Roman soldiers
never so utterly lost their self-control as the Versailles troops appear
to have done. We are beggared for words to describe the scene, and
exclaim that it is hell upon earth. It is nothing less. There are all
the physical and all the moral accessories. Fire and brimstone, storm
and tempest, torture, insult, hatred, despair, all forms of malice,
murder, and destruction, have been raging in Paris during the last few
days. Women forgetting their sex and their gentleness to commit
assassination, to poison soldiers, to burn and to slay; little children
converted into demons of destruction, and dropping petroleum into the
areas of houses; soldiers in turn forgetting all distinctions of sex and
age, and shooting down prisoners like vermin, now by scores and now by
hundreds,--all combine to enact on civilized ground, and within the
sight and hearing of their fellow-men, scenes which find a parallel only
in the infernal regions imagined by prophets and poets. This is what
human nature is capable of; for Frenchmen are men, and we shudder for
our race. But, at all events, what hope is to be seen for France in
this seething abyss? This tragedy is the end of eighty years of
revolutions, of an eighty years' struggle after Liberty and Fraternity,
eighty years of attempts again and again renewed to rebuild French
Society on a new and harmonious basis. The end is a fiercer hatred,
deeper divisions, wilder passions, and more eternal distrust. Will these
six days of savage devastation tend to heal the existing breach between
the lower and the middle classes of France? Will the mutual slaughter of
soldiers and citizens tend towards that essential condition of a happy
State; mutual confidence between the Army and the People? Will the blood
of another butchered Archbishop sow the seeds of peace between the
Priests and their Socialist foes? That which we seem at present to see
in this outbreak of hell is the permanent creation of yawning abysses
between classes, institutions, memories, and men. Paris may, perhaps, be
rebuilt; but what is to wipe out the blood with which every street of
Paris is now stained, and when will women cease to hand down to their
children the envenomed hatreds of May, 1871? Where, above all, are the
signs of that comb