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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
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