The Sun.
London, England, 1857-01-05 00:00:00

L :1;ON, MONDAY, JANUARY 5, 1867.

Monsignor &BOTTA, the Archbishop of Paris,
was on Saturday last, at four o'clock in the after-
noon, barbarously assassinated ! Assassinated by
an ecclesiastic--a priest, named VERGES. Assassi-
nated in a church—the Church of St. Etienne du
Mont. Assassinated at the close of a religious
ceremony—the end of the solemn procession ter-
minating the sacred rites of the neuvaine of
Sainte Genevieve. Every attribute of the hor-
rible seems united to enhance the atrocity of the
crime which has just startled and horrified the
Parisians. The sanctity of the place, the sanctity
of the time, the sanctity of the victim, even, be it
said, the sacred office of the priesthood, outraged
in the person of the wretched being by whom this
deed of blood was dreadfully perpetrated. Al-
though the news of this terrible occurrence has
been brought to us in the first place abruptly and
almost incoherently, through the flashes of the
submarine electric telegraph, we are already in
possession of the fact that the assassin, though a
priest, was a priest under an interdict, a priest
whose functions had been suspended. Obviously
with full reason on the part of his superiors—
seeing the frightful atrocity by which the cause
of his spiritual suspension has been consummated !
No wonder the event which is now spreading an
universal feeling of horror throughout Christen-
dom should have immediately carried, from one
extremity of Paris to the other, but one mingled
sentiment of grief aid consternation. No wonder
that a crime so wholly unparalleled—the murder
of a bishop by a priest, and that too within the
sanctuary of a temple dedicated to the GOD of
Christianity--should have been heard of at the
first moment with a very general sense of incre-
dulity. No wonder, however, when the tidings
were recognised directly afterwards to be beyond
the reach of any doubt whatsoever, no wonder
they were regarded then, even by our volatile
neighbours, with feelings that can be only ex-
pressed as those of profound horror and astonish-
ment.

It is remarkable, to say the very least of it,
that the two last of the venerable Archbishops of
Paris—AFIRE and &noun—should have " died
the death" by assassination. The former by the
bullet of an incendiary revolutionist, the latter by
the dagger of a suspended priest. The murder
of Archbishop AFIRE, it cannot easily be forgotten,
partook in a great measure of the glory and of the
sublimity of martyrdom. The victim fell, carry-
ing in his hand—literally—the Palm of Peace and
of Victory ! His death, be it, reverently spoken,
was an illustration, a visible, historical illustra-
tion, of the DivINE Beatitude—" Blessed are the
peacemakers." His life, as he prayed it might
be, was the last sacrifice in that deadly civil war.
His last words were memorable, were magnificent
—Bonus Pastor dat animam suam pro oribus suis.
His memory is embalmed in the grateful recollec-
tions of the multitude.
The assansination of Archbishop SIBOUR,
none the less in reality than that of his
revered predecessor, partook so far of the
august attributes of martyrdom, inasmuch as
he fell a victim to the rigid discharge of his
ecclesiastical duties, for inasmuch, indeed, as he
fell a victim actually to his resolute vindication
of the sanctity of the office of the priesthood.
Nominated in the summer of 1848 to the Archi
episcopal see of Paris, and to the Primacy of
France, by the then Republican Dictator, Genera.
CAVAIGNA.C, Monsignor &BOUT, has for eight
years presided over the Gallic Church with so much
dignity and equanimity—with such an admirable
blending of decision with toleration—that he has

passed with honour, and respect, and even, be it
added, with veneration for his personal character,
through all the Political change and social tur-

moil consequent upon the successive disorganisation
and reorganisation of the Supreme Government.
Himself an Ultranaontanist outrance, he has
nevertheless, from first to last, preserved an
equable unanimity among his suffragans, through-
out the whole complication of the Gallic Hierarchy
—at home, through the downfall of Republican
Democracy, through the interregnum of the Bona-
partist Presidency, through the coup d' Pat, through
the inaugurative years of the new Imperial regime
—abroad, through the revolutionary convulsions of
'4B-'49, through the Pontifical Sojourn at Gaeta,
through the stormy two years of the conflict with the
Russian Autocracy 1 He has perished at last, like his
revered predecessor, by a violent death, by the hand
of a murderer, by a thunderbolt of assassination.
Struck down—if not upon the barricades, with a
palm-branch in his hand, and that hand raised in
sublime mediatioi between the combatants—
" under the dome in the midst of the temple
consecrated by religion to the GOD of Armies."
Murdered—so far like the great Archbishop of
CANTRIBITRY (ATECKET)—in his pontifical vest-
ments, during the celebration of the religious
rites, upon the steps of the sanctuary ! It is
impossible not to shudder at so hidious a profa-
nation.

Virtue is rising at Washington. Will it be
believed that the House of Representatives has
actually anathematised the slave trade as " shock-
ing to the moral sentiments of the enlightened pox._
tion of mankind," and declared that, " any act on
the part of Congress legalising or conniving at the
legalising of that horrid and inhuman traffic would
justly subject the United States to the reproach
and execration of all civilised and Christian peo-
ple throughout the world ;" and all this icy a ma-
jority of sixty-six. By the still larger majority
of one hundred and seventy-five (183 to 8) it
pronounced the repeal of the laws prohibiting the
African slave trade to be " inexpedient, unwise,
and contrary to the settled policy of the United
States." Surely after this we may begin to hope
even for the United States. The South had
begun in some States to talk 'of reviving the
slave trade, and to resent the laws against it as a
stigma on their " domestic institution." Such a
stigma as it is, however, they must be content to
bear it. Even Congress cannot make up its mind
to efface the mark. The ♦otes were wise ones.
The slave-breeding States were, of course, as op-
posed to the African slave trade as any aboli-
tionist. It would lower the ♦alue of their human
cattle in the market. Indeed, so much would it
do so that some theorists have proposed
an unrestricted importation of fresh Afri-
cans as the means of so reducing the
value of slaves to render the property worthless !
What with the Northern votes, and the in famous
slave-breeding votes of the South, the majority is
easily accounted for.
It strikes one, however, as very cheap Senato-
rial virtue to denounce the slave trade. Northern
sentiments and Southern interests, and the dread
of an implacable war with Great Britain, perhaps
with France also, made it easy enough to reject,
with ostentatious phrases of philanthropy, what
they dare not practically adopt. What makes us
smile here is the appeal to moral sentiments, and
to a religion which equally condemns the internal
slave-trade and slavery itself ; and the apparent
deference to " the enlightened portion of man-
kind," and to " all civilised and Christian people,"
wbo to a man "execrate" American slavery, and
deem it a reproach hardly second to the Cuban
slave trade. If moral sentiments and Christian
civilisation be referred to, let us hope, in all
reason, that they will be invoked against existing
abominations, as well as against those which are
impracticable. In the British dominions, indeed
throughout civilised Europe, Christianity has
abolished slavery as well as the slave trade,
and European Christianity will be apt to think
American Christianity little better than cant and
hypocrisy, unless it show itself strong enough to
do the same thing. There are but too many
Isthauasian Creeds founded on metaphysics, and
damning men if they do not accept their dogmas ;
but of all tie damnable heresies on earth, the
worst assuredly is that which ranks the kidnap-
ping, the buying and selling of human beings
amongst the institutions of Christianity.
Our virtuous cousins, however, cannot escape
the trials to which all virtue is exposed. It seems
that despite of Fugitive Slave Laws, more slaves
than ever have of late escaped from their bene-
factors ; and worse than that, their ingratitude
has even reached the pitch of rising against their
masters, and proposing rather to kill them than
to continue the property of nigger floggers ! Half
Tennessee has been terrified out of its senses with the
fear of a negro insurrection. Not a single white was
actually attacked, but we suppose the accounts of
those who can read and write iu slave states, must
be taken as to the projected attack on the masters
in less populous districts first, to be followed by
attempts on the towns. As the negroes can tell
us nothing, we must take their oppressors at their
word, and relying ou this we must believe that it
was intended on Christmas-day to blow up
churches, and to murder the masters in every
direction. Some powder, suspiciously concealed,
was found ; some slaves ran away when they
thought their plan was detected, and on being
brought back confessed to the conspiracy. At all
events, the whites have hung and shot the poor
creatures without a shadow of resistance on their
part. Some whites, suspected of exciting them to
revolt, were flogged, in one case to death, or thrown
into prison, and all the indications of real fear
were exhibited. In Tennessee the slaves are about
a fourth of the population of the State ; but the
danger, no doubt, arises from their cancentration
in particular spots. In the present case some oue
or two hundred were employed together, ►vith few
superintendents, iu coal and iron works.
The savage tone of the papers is characteristic
alike of guilt and fear. The tyrant must hate
his victims if they know their wrongs and their
rights—above all, if they are in danger of assert-
ing them. The slaveholders, conscious that their
slaves may justly rise for liberty, as their fore-
fathers did under GEORGB 111. ; and knowing that
bloodshed for personal liberty must be even more
lawful than for political liberty, intensely hat©
those whom their oppressions have given the
fullest right to rise in social war. One journal
in the district, the Jeffersonian, gloats over
the idea of " every tree in the country bending
with Negro meat !I" It demands "fearful and
terrible examples the fagot and the flame."
Others denounce missionaries amongst the Negroes
in a similar spirit ; indeed we are reminded
strongly of NICIELOLA.S among the Poles, or Austria
among the Italians, with a difference, perhaps, in
favour of European villany.

The immediate cause of the insurrection, ac-
cording to the most probable accounts, was similar
to that which occasioned the Jamaica insurrection
prior to emancipation there. In Jamaica the de-
bates of the British Parliament reached the slaves
n some garbled form, and induced the belief that
liberty was granted them by England, but with-
held by their masters. In Tennessee it would ap-