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
have been fused into one vast and indistinguishable conflagration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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