THE SIEGE OF PARIS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 17, Issue 945, 16 February 1871, Page 3

THE SIEGE OF PARIS.

[SPECTATOK.} Newspaper correspondents may be getting weary of it, and newspaper readers growing impatient for the long postponed sortie ; but there has been no such event in modern history as the Siege of Paris. We are all annoyed with Parisian vanity, and ashamed of Parisian bombast; but, after all, the grandiloquent talk about •' our sublime attitude," and the " eyes of the universe," and the *' reverence of mankind " has it in no small measure of truth. The world is gazing on Paris, with many thoughts, no doubt, and diverse; but in most of them there is visible a touch of a growing respect. Spartan diplomatists very likely described Athens as Bismarck is said to have recently described Paris, as «* a madhouse full of monkeys," people entirely incapable of living by rule; but the world, for all that, has never been fairly able to forget the madhouse, or the chattering little tribe of premature Parisians—there never were 30,000 of them—who saved nascent civilisation from the Asiatic flood, and gave to the world most of what the world now values. We hear a good deal of the organising faculty of the Prussians, and, nodoubt.it is well worth study; but is there no " organising faculty " in these Parisians also, who, without time or training, or leaders, make armies out oi peasants and workmen, and loungers on the boulevards, and improvise strong governments out of metropolitan members, and melt statuettes into breechloading cannon, and face a nation in arms as if they were a nation too ; who hit by some instinct of their own on the man who can utilise their resources, and then obey him as legal chiefs are very seldom obeyed; who, being bom Sybarites, live for weeks like Russian soldiers because their chief tells them he has a plan ; who, hating labor, work at fortifications like navvies; hating constraint, drill themselves like recruits; and nervously susceptible as girls, bear in tranquil patience weeks of waiting for an earthquake? They are not journalists, but great German generals, who declare that Paris has become an entrenched camp which cannot be taken except by hunger ; who hesitate to bombard lest in that grand duel they should not be victors ; who look askance to this side and that, and half doubt wheth r the enterprise in hand may not prove a gigantic mistake. These " gentlemen of the pavement," these " tragedians of a minor theatre without fixed engagements," as the bitter old lady of Cassel called them, these mountebanks and monkeys have so organised a city, with a million and a half of women and children in it, so fed it, so controlled it, so used it in the grandest sense of the word " use " as to make German generals pause, and doubt whether, after all, their whips cut deep enough to establish full dominion—surely a feat not wholly undeserving of credit. The dissoluteness and frivolity, and pleasure-lovingness of Paris have very little to do with the mere fightinggravity was not the strong point of the race which beat back Xerxes, or morality the special attribute of the people who the world, although they had established the Fioralia—but so far as they have influence, they do but increase the marvel that the dissolute, and the frivolous, and the pleasure loving should bave in them so much else which the gravest, aud sternest, and most preoccupied of mankind feel compelled to acknowledge so grand. What could we steady, sobersided taciturn English have done under such circumstances that these volatile, chattering, dancing Parisians have not done ? Suppose, England having been conquered and the Constitution destroyed, London had suddenly decided to save England, had, without aid, or guidance, or sympathy from without, set up a Government, voted itself a camp, resolved itself into an army, abandoned all business save that of war. ordered Mr Goschen to consider all Londoners paupers and feed them as such, set Sir J. Whit worth to make cannon of the bells, drilled itself eight hours a day, and finally faced the invader as a mighty army,—should we or should we not deem that episode in the history of London worthy of record and admiration ?