The Sun.
London, England, 1870-09-19 00:00:00

FEELING IN PARIS.

The Paris correspondent of the Times says :—" The
French Government and nation are both naturally so
anxious to put a stop to a war which is inflicting incal-
culable material evil on the country, and may eVaittally
lead to political and social evil still more disastrous, that
there are hardly any 'conditions, short of territorial
' cession, which they would not, perhaps, ac-
cept. It is believed that they would pay the expenses
of the war, raze to the ground the fortresses of Strasburg
and Metz, abolish the conscription, and even consent to (0
limitation of the number of their standing army. There
are those who think it possible that the French Govern-
ment would give up part of its fleet—though this
would be indeed a bitter pill to swallow. But
nobody, at least nobody I have met, believes that,
under any pressure whatsover, they will cede territory.
Even if Paris is taken, the Prussians will have to garrison
and govern it, while from some other town of France, no
matter how obscure and remote, a French Govern
went of some kind still defies and nominally carries
on war against them. The majority of the
Parisians, however, believe that Paris cannot be
taken, if a 'tout resistance is made, except by a
blockade ; and they are prepared to make a stout resist-
ance (if present appearances are not strangely deceptive),
trusting that long before they are starved out Europe will
come to their rescue, moved partly by pity and admira-
tion at their gallant defence, partly by indignation and
alarm at the territorial ambition of Prussia. The resist-
ance is likely to be all the stronger in consequence of the
belief that the King of Prussia intends, if he can force
his way into Paris, to endeavour to put Napoleon again ,
upon the throne. There is an intensely bitter feeling
among a large portion of the Parisians against the
Emperor. Nothing is too bad to be believed of him."

THE PRENCH ARMY.

The Paris correspondent of the Daily Telegraph writes :
—" We had a striking demonstration yesterday of the
strength of the garrison which Paris contains. It was, I
presume, with a view to giving heart to our two millions
of inhabitants that General Troehu conceived the idea of
making some two or three hundred thousand men pass
ostentatiously in review before him from the Arc de-
l'Etoile to the Bastille. No one could have looked on and
watched the steady, sober, and brawny peasants, who
marched in endless file before the Governor of Paris and
the Provisional Government, without petceiving that
they were made of very different material from the rank
and file who trooped through Paris at the commence-
ment of the war and' marched' to the front amidst
yells and choruses " A Berlin !" When this
gigantic struggle is terminated there will, doubt-
less, he some startling revelations of the cor-
ruption and imbecility which have characterised
the Imperialism of the Second Empire, and which
have reduced that once mighty engine of war, the
French army, to the wretched state of inefficiency
in which Niel and Lebceuf left it. But although the dis-
closures which will hereafter leap to light cannot fail to
shock and surprise us, I am told that few will be more
astounding than those that will lay bare the manner in
which the conscription has been worked. Your readers
are doubtless aware that in each successive year it has
been the custom in. France to take the names of all the
young men who had arrived at a certain age, and to throw
all those names into urns from which a specified number
-were taken by lot to serve as conscripts in the regular
army. Wherever the name of a young man thus selected
who happened to be rich, or engaged in a lucrative
trade, or about to be married, or, for any other rea-
son, was disinclined to join the army as a soldier,
the State permitted him to pay a certain sum, which
-varied in amount year after year, and which exempted
him from the necessity of shouldering a musket and
learning the goose-step. This " substitute fund"
ought, strictly speaking, to have been devoted to
the purpose of finding rernplacants, or men who, by
reason of the bounty paid them, would consent to replace
others who had been originally selected, but who had
bought themselves off. Unless lam misinformed, this
very fund was the rich prize upon which the
Poachers have found that it was most easy to lay their
encroaching hands, and thus to starve the army of
the men who were absolutely required to make up
its complement. It will thus be understood
why the efficient sum total of the French army, which
ought, according to law, to have been 400,000 men,
amounted to but 250,000 when the Emperor and
the Duc de Gramont took Prussia by the nose.
There is something grotesque and ludicrous, if it were
not humiliating and saddening to every French heart,
in the thought that a Government which was either con-
sciously or from careless irresponsibility, robbing and
weakening the army upon which it was supported, should
have thrown itself into a war which required greater
strength of armament and readiness of preparation than
any other upon which France ever embarked. But in
addition to the fact that a large number of conscripts
annually bought themselves off, and were never replaced
by substitutes, it was universally remarked in Paris that
the regiments hurried to the front at the end of July were
composed of small, weak, and unsoldierlike men. It has
since transpired that the officers who had charge
of the bureau de remplacement were in the habit of
bribing the poorest and meanest specimens of French
humanity to serve inthe army, Because they were willing
to become soldiers upon cheaper terms than young active
men who were able - to support themselves by their own
industry and skill as workmen or agricultural
labourers. If lam not mistaken, this war has sounded
the knell of the conscription in France for all future time.
It was against the conscription, and the First Napoleon's
unsparing use of it, that, in hip famous pamphlet, pub-
lished in 1814, Chateaubriand thundered with an elo-
quence and force which no French writer has ever sur-
passed. "By the conscription," he exclaimed, "trade,
arts, and letters are remorselessly destroyed. Neigh-
bouring nations, forced, whether they like it or not, to
arm in self-defence, abandon in their turn the blessings
of civilisation, and, precipitated upon one another, bring
the Goths and Vandals, and the concomitant calamities
of their era, back upon,the stage. Children, doomed
to pillage and slaughter, no longer care for their parents—
fathers and mothers no longer bestow solicitude upon their
children. The code of the conscription will remain an
eternal protest against Napoleon Bonaparte's reign. It is
truly the code of hell. The generations of France were
arrayed in regular rows for the axe, like the trees of a I
forest. Each year saw 80,000 young men cut down am
inexorably Sacrifice l."