The Bee-Hive. — 1871-06-10 (London, England)

THE BRITISH LIONS. ENGLISH OPINION ON THE SITUATION /N  FRANCE.  SIR,—THE curtain is slowly falling on that terrible Paris drama, and more than time it should, as the outside world have become surfeited with horrors. Of the party of the Commune, so utterly destroyed, little is known. When it started into existence it was a surprise to everybody, and whilst it lived and struggled, its objects, intentions, and at came to us explained by persons who made no disguise of their hatred. We were ignorant at first of the men and their intentions, and, from the character of our newspaper reports, it is difficult not to believe that this ignorance has been replaced by error, exaggeration, and misconception, instead of truth and fact. Nobody justifies the men of the Commune. From the first, even if we take the most favourable view of their conduct, it was impossible not to condemn it, were it for no other reason than the difficulty which they seemed to have undertaken of forcing on the country a system, for the adoption of which it was not prepared, and which was certain to become impossible with the Versailles Clovetnment, the army, the priests, and the peasantry against it. To plunge into civil war, even for the highest and holiest purpose, is a crime, unless in resistance to the grossest tyranny, and unless the chances of success are good, and the benefit of the change sought, 'greatly more than a full counterbalance to the loss in life and property it is likely to involve. Indeed, civil war can never be justified so long as any chance of peaceable reform and improvement remains with a people.  But, whilst this may be insisted on as a general truth, it is quite certain that the men of the Commune were not the introducers of oivil strife to the world, and we must judge them, whatever the character of their errors and crimes, as we should judge ethers who have promoted and mixed themselves up in sanguinary civil wars. We must, if we would get at true conclusions in this matter, keep clear of the miserable cant used on all sides by men who are seeking to "improve the occasion' in favour of some religious or political dogma, in the progress of which they feel an interest, and on behalf of which they read history with one eye shut. Archbishop AIANNING, one of this class, attributes the crimes of the Commune to a look of religion; and this lack of religion he traces to the departure of nations from the Roman Catholic Church. Whilst doing this, how oblivious the good man must have been of the horrible bloodletting indulged in and encouraged by this very Church itself—slaughters, before which the worst butcheries of the men of the Commune were as the priokings of pins and needles. Did the ARCHBISHOP ever read the Amalfi of the Huguenot. If not, let him turn to certain volumes published by a literary society in France in 1852, consisting of documents gathered from the French archives and from family collections; and if he doubts general history, in these he will see enough to convince him of the manner in which the Church and its faithful children could do a wholesale stroke of murder before FELIX PYAT, ROCHEFORT, or their followers, were known to the world. Not wishing to horrify your readers, we shall confine ourselves to one extract from the letter of a Jesuit written whilst the murder was going on. It relates principally to the death of Admiral CO LIGNI g The Ipluatt has perished miserably on the 24th of A.ugnot with the whole of the heretic nobility of France. Tho carnage was enormous. I shuddered at the sight of the river Choked with mutilated corpses. We all agree in praising the wisdom and magnanimity of the King, who, having by indulgenee and favour fattened, as it were, the heretics like cattle, has caused them to be slaughtered by his soldiers. All the heretic scholars who could be dis. covered have been massacred and -thrown into the stream naked. RAHN', who jumped out of his bedroom from a considorable height, lies exposed on the bank pierced thick with stabs. In a word, there is not one of them, even of their women, who is not slain Or wounded'. CONRAD gave the ADMIRAL the third stab ; at the seventh he 4311 dead against the chimney of his room;