The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-06-12


hardly lone stone upon another that has not |
been thrown down. It is Of the beautiful |
city itself we think, and not mainly of its |
people. We sorrow for the miracle of art |
and magnifcence, the fairest capital in |
Europe, the chief intellectual stimulus of the |
whole Western world, the one place which |
nobody visited without receiving a new inn |
preston of the vividness of life and the bril-
iiancy of man, the spot on the surface of our
planet where human faculty seemed the
keenest and the most available, where human
wit had reached its eliminating point And
this, OF course, though the work of the
French people, was not the work of the
French people in any one generation. In
every sense Paris has been capitdL for she 4
had inherited the accumulated intellectual
wealth of ages, and the great palaces aud
terraces and monuments and gardens which
made her SO fair were as much the
products of savings, as much artistic
capital essential to the magic she
welded over the minds of men, as the mills
and looms of Manchester, the products of
Lancsshire's past savings, ere essential to the
great industrial work of every new year of
our cotton manufacture. Paris as "a city of
confusion that is broken down." Paris with
shattered monuments and ruined palaces,
and tumbling bridges and wasted gardens
and river choked with fragments of ma
sonry, cannot exert her old spell over the
imaginations of men till the waste places are
restored, and the wilderness again blossoms
as the rose. There are adjuncts to the power
of men which are essential conditions of its
exercise, and therefore it is, we suppose, that
we feel authorized to grieve more when we
hear of a destruction which prevents France
from being to the future of Europe what
she has been to the past, than we grieve
even when we hear of the sweeping away
of a great portion Of generation of French
men in the hurricane of foreign and civil war.
Men may come and men may CO. but while
the spell of France remained, there would
always be Frenchmen enough to use it and
transmit the great French tradition to the
world. But now, when ''all Joy is darkened,
the mirth of the land is gone, in the city is
left desolation, and the gate is smitten with
destruction, who is to cast thespell of France
over us? With Paris in ruins, the staff of the
enebanter is broken and her magic lost. The
'Capital of Pleasure has become wilder
ness, and while it remains so France must
lose her peculiar place in the world, and the
heart of the continent almost cease to beat.
1t can hardly be denied, we think, that there
are physical conditions of human life so full
of significance and so difficult to create
anew, that their loss diminishes the moral
significance of the life of the men who are
their natural Interpreters even more than the
loss of any number of those interpreters
themselves. A plague in Rome that destroyed
half the population would be a fearful thing,
but would it be wrong TO feel IL q less
calamity by far than the physical destruction
of Rome itself, even though ali the inbabi-
tants had had time and warning to escape
1t cannot be inhumen to think SO, for did
not our Lord himself, who named himself the
Son of Man to show his intensity of human
sympathy, speak of the physical destruction
of Jerusalem with q shade OF al
most deeper pity and sorrow than he
expressed in referring to the mere carnage and
loss of life which would accompany it? The
destruction of typical city, of a centre of
age-lopg life, is the end of that age, in a sense
in which the mere cutting off of half gene
ration of men need not necessarily be so at
ALL What was, is at an end; who but pro-
phet can tell what will be? How shall we
know that the old spell which the suicidal
armies of the Commune and the fratricidal
armies of Versailles have destroyed between
them shall ever be revived2 No one would
desire to see it precisely what it was. There
was enough of Circe in Paris to turn even
the wisest of men who had no antidote
''moly" in their hearts, not only into the
| most grovelling, but into the maddest and
most possessed of swine.
That that part of her spell may be
silent for ever we shall all wish. Bot may not
the power to give fitting framework to the
small things of life, to fascinate and vivify,
to create a true social intercourse, and send
a thrill of tenderness and gayety through the
trivialities of conversation, go with it May
not the ruin of Paris torn out to be the judg-
ment-day of an epoch, in which much that is
| good will pass away along with much that
was evil, and Pleasure lose, with many of her
worst Dangers AL her counsels of perfection?
On the whole, We are persuaded that it is no
spurious and inhuman judgment which
shrinks back from such news as we have
received this week, with even more awe
and misgiving than from the news of
the bloodiest battle field and the most destruc-
tive campaign. There are external conditions
of life which thread together history, and the
annihilation of which ends and begins an era.
1t is possible nay, it is quite probable that tho
burning of Paris is catastrophe of this
nature,-the more so that it arose from the
collision of social discOrd, and not from the
shock of conquest. If only as a measure of
the fierce internecine passions that have been
at work in the very heart of French society,
this mighty explosion must shake France to
the very centre, and mould her future into
new and probably less unconstrained and
buoyant life than that of her past.
The importance that is so naturally at
tached to the physical devastation of Paris is
not, then, in our opinion, due to that weak
ness of imagination which is unable to realize
the meaning of great accumulated mass OF
human misery so vividly as it can realize a
great loss of material grandeur and wealth:
on the contrary, it is due to the instructive
feeling that very much greater change is
coming over human life than any mere short.
ening of the period of one generations exist
ence would imply. 1t may be quite true that
if any great building were on fire, the man
who deliberately postponed the duty of Sc.
curing the endangered lives of the sleeping
women and children to that of rason