now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." These were nearly the last words-the novissima verba of ABRAHAM LINCOLN-and man may meet his God with calmness when a violent death snatches him from this world with sentiments like these.

We have no desire to pronounce a precipitate judgment; what is to be wished for the sake of honor and humanity is, that this odious outrage may have been the work of some isolated fanatic. It would be too sad a spectacle to see a lost cause replying by assassination to the magnanimity of its conquerors.

It may be affirmed, moreover, that this odious deed is also a useless crime. Mr. LINCOLN dies surrounded with the purest glory that ever crowned a statesman; but his work will survive him, and the greatest victory of liberty will not have been won in vain. The mission designed by Providence for the United States does not depend upon the life of one man, and that liberty which created Mr. LINCOLN, and which he has served so well, will infallibly raise up worthy successors to him.

GUSTAVE ISAMBERT.

[From the Opinion Nationale, April 28, 1865.]

It is with profound grief that we yesterday received the news of the abominable crime which has so suddenly extinguished in the United States a noble and precious life.

President LINCOLN was one of those men who do honor to their country, to the age in which they live, and to all humanity. The American republic never produced a better, a greater citizen.

Mr. LINCOLN was the embodiment of duty. He knew but one road-the right line-and to admirable perseverance he joined a loftiness of view, a cor

rectness of judgment, a moderation, a generosity of sentiment which inspired respect, commanded admiration, and elicited sympathy.

Mr. Seward, whose life we still hope will be preserved, is himself a man of integrity—a remarkable politician-a diplomatist of skill and tact, altogether unexceptionable, which he has proved under circumstances peculiarly difficult, in warding off from his country the constantly threatening danger of foreign complications.

One thing only can console us in this heavy misfortune: the crime will remain an abortive one. The Union, re-established by President LINCOLN, will be free from all attacks after the last and decisive victories of Grant and his generals. We will say more. It is in the nature of these frightful outrages against moral and social order to recall men to the wholesome appreciation of things, to the necessity of concord, and the importance of fraternity; and the assassination of Mr. LINCOLN will lead to the more speedy return to the Union of the defenders of the secessionists' cause, who are in a state of alarm and consternation at a crime of which they are innocent, but which was none the less committed in the name of their cause.

It is true that on the 6th of April Mr. Jefferson Davis published a proclamation in which he declared his intention to carry on war; but this manifest was previous to the surrender of Lee and his army, and the valiant general who laid down his arms in order to avoid a perfectly useless shedding of blood, morally obliged Mr. Davis to give up a struggle which henceforward could hold out no possible hope of success.

If he persisted it would prove that passion had the mastery of his reason, and that pride goes for much in that ill-understood patriotism which has done nothing but heap disasters upon disasters and ruin upon ruin.

If, besides, the conduct of General Lee had not enlightened Mr. Jefferson Davis, the blood which has just flowed at Washington under the steel of assassins, would, no doubt, bring him to his senses, if it were only to ward off an accusation which would not fail to be made, that of having seen in the crime of the assassins an unexpected piece of good fortune, and having sought to turn it to account in resuscitating a ruined cause.

In another column will be found some circumstantial details of the great assassination, and we devote a special article to the policy of President LINCOLN.

The emotion caused by the death of Mr. LINCOLN has been immense in England, and the London journals manifest with energy the horror with which this frightful outrage has inspired them.

An address of condolence has been presented to the American minister by the members of the House of Commons. Business has been suspended at the Exchange and in the markets; and the most enthusiastic partisans of the secessionist cause have themselves expressed the most intense indignation.Editorial.

MR. LINCOLN.

1

The odious crime of which the President of the United States has just become the victim will be felt as a public misfortune throughout the whole of the civilized world. Mr. LINCOLN had had that rare good fortune, for a statesman, to attain to power by the idea of which he had become the personification, and of having been able to bring to a close the immense task which events, much more than his own will, had imposed upon him; an abolitionist by conviction, but, above all, a practical and experienced man, he would not, perhaps, have taken the initiative in the formidable question of slavery, if the precipitation of the South had not found in the elevation of Mr. LINCOLN to the presidential chair a cause or a pretext for an insurrection which had been long premeditated. Provoked by an open revolt, which permitted him neither to fall back nor to think of a compromise, Mr. LINCOLN accepted without hesitation. the heavy responsibility which had fallen upon him. Without allowing himself to be discouraged by the first reverses, he applied himself with invincible. tenacity to create, to organize everything that he wanted-men, generals, an army. The immensity of the pecuniary sacrifices, the mediocrity of the first generals whom he found at hand, the brilliant successes of his adversaries, the threatening sympathies of Europe, nothing stopped him, nothing made him go. on faster than his own wisdom counselled him to do. It is to be remarked, too, that, abolitionist as he was, he decided to proclaim the abolition of slavery with a sort of hesitation peculiar to resolute characters, who do not easily make up their minds to go forward, precisely because they know that they will not recede.

At length, after four years' exertions, victory crowned his policy; his fellowcitizens, full of confidence in him, conferred upon him a second time the power of the presidency. Skilful generals, whom the war had brought to the surface, reduced and disarmed the insurrection. Then this firm and intractable man, who could never be brought to negotiate with insurrection, appeared in a fresh light, and showed himself as though he were disarmed by victory. The most noble sentiments of conciliation, a kind of chivalric delicacy which disguises from the conquered the bitterness of defeat, an anxious solicitude to reconstruct the Union, with the help even of those who had broken away from it, burst forth spontaneously in the language of the conqueror of a new type, and impressed upon him a character of modest grandeur and superior morality which is refreshing to the mind, and makes one feel proud and honored to belong to human nature. The attitude of Mr. LINCOLN during the last days of his life, and his language with regard to the southern States, form, with the correspondence so heroically simple exchanged between Grant and Lee, a characteristic picture of which the New World has a right to be proud.

The intention which guided the arm of the assassin of LINCOLN appears

also to have inspired the outrage of which Mr. Seward and his son have been the victims; it appears even, if reliance can be placed upon the summary details which comprise all the information that has at present come to hand on this melancholy subject, that it is only by a fortunate accident that Grant and the Minister of War, Mr. Stanton, have escaped an attempt of the same kind.

So painful an experience of the furious passions left upon the mind after the defeat of the South, will urge upon the principal civil and military heads of the Union a system of personal precautions, the necessity for which is only too grievously demonstrated. Let us hope that it will occasion no other modification of the generous policy inaugurated by LINCOLN, and which will be for his fellow-citizens the best and most prolific portion of their inheritance.

As for Europe, it will feel acutely the premature death of the great and good man whom America has just lost. His firmness, moderation, and patriotism, sincere and without ostentation, were a pledge that, entirely absorbed with the desire of healing the deep wounds inflicted by civil war, he would not divert attention with foreign broils so as to render the American people careless of their internal reorganization.

The death of LINCOLN puts everything in a state of uncertainty. Until now, Vice-President Johnson, whom this melancholy accident has invested with power, was the object of certain prejudices, which it is asserted have no foundation. Do not let us be in a hurry to judge the matter. Responsibility carries along with it much deliberation and caution; and, then, the force of public opinion, the power of democracy, that sound collective sense which comes from the midst of a free population, always well informed upon public affairs, and their watched over by an unshackled press, and accustomed to decide upon own interests-all this assures us that the fate of the great American republic cannot be endangered by the death of its Chief Magistrate, however superior or great a man. There are, in the depths of democracy, valuable reserves of character and unknown talents, which necessity will raise to the surface. We are afflicted with the death of President LINCOLN, but it throws us into no uneasiness. And, again, why should we grieve? Since we are all born to die, who could dream of so desirable a death!

Have not the duties of LINCOLN's career been fulfilled? Is not his work finished? And does not his triumphant death lend a tragic brilliancy to the sober and masculine virtues of this worthy successor of Washington?

R. DE GUERAULT.

The slave rebellion has closed, with a triple assassination, the terrible conflict which it has sustained for four years with the Washington government. It was not sufficient for it to have caused rivers of blood to flow on the fields of battle. It demanded, even after the war, still more victims. It has immolated

Mr. LINCOLN, the great citizen; a man as conciliatory as he was energetic; the head of the state, who, finding himself confronted with the most terrible civil war related in history, has shown how, at one and the same time, to save his country and solve the most difficult social problem of modern times.

The crime was not, unfortunately, the act of a madman, but the result of a conspiracy, plotted by the envenomed partisans of slavery. At the moment when one of the assassins, Wilkes Booth, struck down Mr. LINCOLN at the theatre, another stabbed the Secretary of State, Mr. William H. Seward, and his son, Frederick Seward, at their own residence. This is the intelligence sent by the Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton, and communicated yesterday to the London journals by Mr. Francis Adams.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, William Henry Seward, and Frederick Seward have been assassinated.

In the presence of these corpses, which will long dwell in our thoughts, before these tombs, which have scarcely closed over them, it is well that democracy should utter a word of fraternity.

Great reforms have not been accomplished but at the price of the lives of the reformers.

The freedom of the blacks has been prefaced with the execution of John Brown, and the epilogue is the assassination of LINCOLN. That is the order. Conquered reactions protest by the use of hemlock, the dagger, the funeral pile, and the gibbet.

It will always be thus so long as the dogma of the inviolability of human life shall not have penetrated all consciences.

After John Brown, the scaffold ceased to appear to be a ligitimate resort. After LINCOLN, political assassination, the old Spartan doctrine of the sic semper tyrannis, remains irredeemably condemned. Who will profit by the abominable act? Will the South? Certainly not! The South was only conquered; now it is dishonored. But it is the great republic now consecrated by martyrdom. It is the black race redeemed by the blood of the just, and it is especially the inviolability of human life that will be benefited by the deed.

No more scaffolds! No more tyrannicide! It is time that the eastern doctrine of the redemption of blood should cease to receive the consecration of history.

J. LABBE.

[From the Opinion Nationale, April 30, 1865.]

The funeral service, which we yesterday announced at the end of our bulletin, took place to-day, at 12 o'clock, in the Episcopal chapel, in Rue Bayard, being celebrated by the Rev. M. Lamson.