The Sun.
London, England, 1867-10-22 00:00:00

AMERICANS IN PARIS.

The hands and the wealth of all nations feed
Paris—feed the immoralities of Paris, and then the
heads of all nations judge, and the tongues of all
nations pronounce against Paris and the French,
calling them the most licentious people in the world.
Would it not bo better to be a little frank and honest
with ourselves ? Perhaps we shall then understand
Paris and the French.
The Parisians are purveyors to the pleasures of
the world, and it is the wealth and self-indulg-
ence of foreigners that make Paris a world by
itself, a city sustained as a public-house of feasting
and revelry.
Paris is colonised by every people. Medical
students, artists, clergymen, and rich men of Eng-
land and America are assembled in Paris ; and it is
a notorious fact that the histories of the greatest
excesses here aro inscribed with the names of Ame-
ricans. Yet we turn around and throw stones at
Paris ! You have to be reminded that there is more
than one Commandment, and that Americans come
here to break those they pretend to keep at home.
It seems to me necessary to write these facts, and
yet let it not be supposed that because it is Parisian
we concede anything to that infamous life which
riots in Paris, and makes the Boulevards so brilliant
and painful to a man of sensibility.

TIIE LIFE OF GREAT CITIES.

There is no concession to be made to infamy, but
I understand the streets of great cities to be daily
illustrations of its life, and those illustrations are
the themes of criticism and talk. Knowing them
we know our age.
When you discover the finest street of the most
civilised city in the world thronged with facts—a
vast flood of facts—all tending to oue conclusion,
and that conclusion wretched, hopeless, indifferent to
the sentiment of humanity or the truths of Chris-
tianity, what must you say and feel?
You cannot turn and say—France is Roman
Catholic or Pagan, therefore France has no god
but voluptuousness, and no ambition but for plea-
sure. London, on the other side of the Channel—
a grand city, where life is less attractive and
equally cruel ; where the streets present a more
gloomy but no less irresistible argument against
the hope of the brotherhood of man and the con-
secration of woman—is Protestant, and professes to
be Christian. _ _

Civilisation being as it is in Paris and in Lon-
don, how shall you escape the same in New York,
in Boston, in St. Louis? These are questions
which the old world forces upon every new social
effort. But already New York has begun to re-
peat Paris, and St. Louis is striding in the steps
of New York. It is these facts in France that
have evoked the theories of the St. Sitnonians,
and a foretaste of them has provoked in America
what our foreign critics call " the revolt of the

women."

You know very well how these facts are treated
by the so-called religious press, and how they are
ignored by the rich and happy. Both betray
physical insensibility and mental obtuseness to
the conditions that environ a large part of the
human race in great cities. I see no help ; only
the necessity of silence and the care of one's own
life. But the cut-and-dried moralities of tired sin-
ners and weak temperaments, and the unhappi-
ness of the victims of civilisation, force a counter
expression, and revoice the question, How shall we
escape repeating the tragic and brilliant drama of
Roman decadence ?

Go to the Boulevard des Italiens at night, walk
amid that crowd of men, idle, rich, curious, dream-