PANDEMONIUM.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 18, Issue 1091, 10 August 1871, Page 2

PANDEMONIUM.

[WtOM THE LONDON "SPECTATOR," JUNE 27.] Only Jeremiah, only the Prophet of Woe, the poet who sang of the coming destruction of Jerusalem in strains which have ever since been used by mankind to express a horror otherwise inexpressible, could adequately describe the fate which has fallen upon the capital of France, a fate belonging properly to other times, to older and fiercer races, to a world differently ruled from ours. Little doubt can now exist either as to the meaning or the authorship of the events now occurring in Paris. Deserted by all the more moderate of their leaders, despairing of aid from the rest of the cities of France, threatened daily by the cruel proclamations of the Head of the Government, too well aware that they had neither mercy nor quarter to expect from the exasperated soldiery, maddened by the continuous excitement of nine months, by defeat, by fatigue, by the certainty that their cause was lost, the remaing Reds, it is clear, resolved to inflict on France, on mankind, on Paris itself, one tremendous vengeance, which should live for ever as proof of the danger of driving the Red party to despair. France would have Paris, and France should have her, as a heap of ashes. The rival suitor had won, but should only find his bride a corpse. The prize so long played for should be surrendered, but only when its value has been destroyed. Collecting all that remained of the Red battalions, the chiefs —first among whom was Delescluse—prepared for a desperate resistance, and a more desperate catastro phe. For three days they fought step by step, from barricade to barricade, from building to building, and as each was abandoned each was given to the flames. Paris, of all cities in the world will not burn ; but a devilish ingenuity was taxed to overcome that difficulty,—the stores of petroleum were requisitioned, and the almost inextinguishable flame of burning oil proved irresistible even by stone masonry. The Tuileries, the Louvre, the Hotel de Ville, the Palace of Justice, the Ministry of Finances, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Luxemburg, — most, as we believe will be found, of the great buildings of Paris, the pride of generations, —were set on fire or shattered by explosions, and under a pall of pungent smoke, by the light of burning treasures, the common property of mankind, the Reds fought street by street against the advancing troops. The scene must have been one which Josephus could scarcely have described or Martin painted, for, maddened by the resistance, by the fires, by the destruction of the city, by religious and political hate, and by M. Thiers' exhortation to treat their enemies as malefactors, the Generals gave a loose to the fury of their troops and treated their own capital as a city taken by storm Shells were fired without respect for monuments, palaces were destroyed merely to make a road, quarter was refused even to the submissive, and the horror-struck correspondent of the Daily News, himself a soldier, describes scenes of vengeauce and fiendish cruelty, such as it is not well to dwell on, such as have not been known in Europe since Tilly excused the similar scene in Magdeburg, by declaring that soldiers must have some recompense for their trials. The fighting all this while was not good. It seems clear that the Reds, though they resisted, strove to shelter themselves, aud that the Versaillese troops, though they obeyed orders, pressed on slowly; but the feebleness on both sides deepened rather than lightened the horror of the astounding tragedy. By the latest accounts the troops had prevailed, and the Reds were being massacred, though resisting, but the subjugated city was still in flames, still hidden from observers by the red smoke, still liable to the destruction its insane children intended to have brought upon themselves. We do not know yet, and shall not know for days, precisely the extent of destruction accomplished ; probably it is much less than was described in the first horror-struck reports,—but we know sufficient to see that the Reds intended to bury themselves under the ruins of Paris, to perceive, if we cannot understand, the height to which hatreds have risen on both sides. That, after all, is the truly horrible revelation of those three days. France might survive the burning of Paris as Russia survived the burning of Moscow, or England the Firejof London ; Jjut what resources can suffice to fill up

the chasm which evidently exists in her society, what is to cure social hate so deadly that rather than offer terms to h er capital the country sanctions a war of ex« termination, and rather than yield to the provinces the capital contrives her own, destruction in blood and fire ? That Parisians should hesitate to admit defeat is intelligible, that they should have merged all love for country in love fox their own city is conceivable, that they should be wild for vengeance on France, on M. Thiers, on the soldiery, —all this is within experience; but that they should destroy their own city rather than see it in the" hands of their owo country men* that they should give to the flames their own buildings, their own homes, their own families —for all were equally endangered—rather than yield for a timeto a rule that they detested —these things, reveal a power of unreasoning hate, & capacity of resultless malico such as the mind refuses to analyse, and almost to believe. It is the fury of a Malay, not of a fanatic, which is betrayed in a design like this, as it is the fury of a drunken peasant, not of a true seldier, which is., manifested in the hideous cruely with which punishment is said to have been enforced. There is a wild beast in man, we all know; but the beast in its maddest fury defends its own den and its own litter, instead of raging against both. In the worst excesses of the first Revolution,, when the people had the wrongs of centuries to avenge, they still spared the city which their successors, suffering under much less oppression, have endeavored to destroy. The catastrophe is enough to destroy hope in the future, for what hope is there if men trained to, civilisation for centuries, not immediatelyoppressed, not possessed by an idea, not excited by the preseuce of the foreigner, can deliberately sacrifice themselves, their works, the possessions of mankind, to thethirst for a momentary vengeance which, in the intention at all events, they are not to live to see ? The men who burnt Paris would, if they had the power, burn a world rather than its people should live after their own fashion. Nothing like the suicide in Paris —whether it be accomplished or only attempted —hus ever occurred in history, and is perhaps as vain to study it as a political incident, as it would be to draw a social argument from a scene in Bedlam ; but we may record a political impression. This great crime has been fatal for the present to, the chances of a Republic. It has been, it is true, committed by Reds aud punished by Republicans, but the average Frenchman will not draw that will insist that moderation is a security, will demand that the form of government Reds prefer shall under no circumstances be the form adopted. M. Thiers may hold out, probably will; but the rush of emo-. tion, of rage, of fear, will, we anticipate, prove too strong for him, and power will be transferred either to some military chief, or to avoid that very danger, to a monarch selected by the Assembly, and sure therefore to be a member of the House of Bourbon. In any event and in any form, the Government will become sternly, perhaps savagely, repressive, and the master evil of France, the limitation or destruction of free political life, will be continued, and will renew and revive the malignant hatred, and hardly human social antipathies, the burning fury which twenty years of stern repression have generated in the minds of the artisan. If there is a lesson to be learnt from the burning of Paris, it is that political pas-; sion driven in on itself by external violence festers in Frenchmen until it lopes political insanity. Yet this is the one lesson which the Assembly and its leaders are certain not to learn. Nothing but a miracle can savo France from recommencing her dreary round —repress sion to be followed by revolution, revolution by anarchy, anarchy by still severer repression—once more. Nothing in the history of the ceDtury, not even the war on freedom proclaimed when the first Napoleon fell, has ever disheartened and saddened true Liberals like this last declaration by the Reds of war upon the accumulated civilisation of mankind,