cruel in its consequences, enrolled himself in the troop which took Brown, and that he was one in the cortege of inexorable fanatics who conducted the unfortunate (Kansas) farmer to the gibbet. There would be a sort of ferocious fatality in the coincidence which made one of the executioners of Brown the pitiless murderer of Mr. LINCOLN; but whatever may have been the fanaticism with which the assassin was animated, it would be an odious injustice to treat as accomplices in the murder the populations who furnished Stonewall Jackson and Robert Lee the heroic soldiers under their command. The American people will not commit this injustice.

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[From the Siècle, April 28, 1865.]

The American republic had triumphed over the rebellion of the slave States; nothing more was required than to subdue the difficulties of peace itself. The man who had accomplished the first of these tasks, and was on the point of effecting the second, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, has just fallen beneath the blow of a secessionist. Slavery, therefore, has its fanatics!

What was LINCOLN before the suffrages of his fellow-citizens placed him at the head of the republic? A carpenter Then a grocer, taking advantage of his brief intervals of leisure to study the law. Charged with the government of one of the greatest nations in the world, in a crisis the most terrible in its history, the ex-carpenter showed himself equal to the situation. It will be the same with him who succeeds Mr. LINCOLN in so unexpected a manner, and who, like his predecessor, attained to the rank he occupies by the various gradations of labor. The great republic will pursue the course of her glorious career. As for the man who has just paid with his life for the place which history reserves for him, by the side of Washington, he goes down to the grave followed by the regret of the whole world. We should utter our own feelings of sorrow with greater emotion if the calm and simple figure which we have just employed did not arrest our pen, and impose upon us a degree of tranquillity and simplicity.

While one of the assassins killed Mr. LINCOLN, another penetrated into the room of Mr. Seward, who was in bed suffering from an accident reported in all the journals, and stabbed him repeatedly with a dagger. The son of Mr. Seward lost his life in endeavoring to defend his father. It was only by an accident that General Grant himself escaped death. On the departure of the mail, Mr. Seward was still living. May his life be spared to find in the esteem and respect of every friend of liberty some compensation for the loss which he has just sustained as a father and a citizen. A distinguished writer, an eloquent speaker, Mr. Seward has been able to show what he was worth, as a statesman,

under the most difficult and delicate circumstances. Thanks to him that northern America has been able to preserve an attitude at once calm and firm in the face of foreign powers, which have been nearly all either ill-disposed or hostile.

TAXILE DELORE.

A GREAT DEMOCRATIC MARTYR.

Slavery, before expiring, has summoned up what remained to it of power and rage, in order to strike, from behind, the man by whom it was to be overthrown.

The satanic pride of this perverted society could not be resigned to defeat. It would not fall with honor, like other causes, destined to rise again. It expired, as it had lived, by violating every law, human and divine.

There is the spirit and probably the work of the famous secret association of the Golden Circle, which, after having for twenty years made preparations for the great rebellion, spread its accomplices thoughout the west and the north, and around the chair of the President gave the signal for that impious war on the day when public conscience at last snatched from the slaveholders the government of the United States.

On the day when the good man of whom they have just made a martyr was raised to power, they endeavored to carry into effect what had been concocted by treason.

But they failed; not succeeding in overthrowing LINCOLN by the force of war, they felled him by assassination.

The conspiracy appeared to have been a most desperate one. In assailing with the President his two principal ministers, on one of whom an attempt was made, and the commander-in-chief, who was saved by an unforeseen circumstance, the murderers reckoned upon disorganizing the government of the republic, and imagined that they were resuscitating the rebellion.

Their expectations will be disappointed. These sanguinary fanatics, whose cause is much less damaged by material superiority than by the moral power of the democracy, had become incapable of comprehending the nature and the results of the free institutions which their fathers had gloriously contributed to establish. We shall see a fresh example of what these institutions are able to effect.

The indignation of the people will not be exhausted in a passing explosion; it will become consecrated; it will be resumed in the unanimous action, persevering and invincible, of the universal will. Whoever are to be the agents, the instruments of this work, we may rest assured that it will be accomplished. The event will show that it was not dependent upon the life of one man, or

upon several men It will be accomplished after LINCOLN, as well as it was accomplished by him, but LINCOLN will remain the austere and sacred personification of a great epoch, the most faithful exponent of democracy.

This man, simple and upright, strong and prudent, raised by degrees to the command of a great people, and always equal to the situation, executing quietly and without precipitation, and with excellent good sense, the most colossal undertaking, giving to the world an example of civil power in a republic, directing a gigantic war without for a moment compromising free institutions, or threatening them with military usurpation, dying at last at the moment when, having conquered, he was about to pacify the country-(and God grant that the atrocious madman who killed him may not have destroyed with him the feeling of clemency, and determined upon pacification by force, instead of the peace which he desired!)-this man will live in the traditions of his country and of the world, in some sort the embodiment of the people, modern democracy itself. It was necessary, then, that the blood of the just should seal the great work of emancipation, which the blood of the just had inaugu· rated! The tragic history of the abolition of slavery, opened with the gibbet of John Brown, will close with the assassination of LINCOLN.

And now let him repose by the side of Washington, as the second founder of the great republic! The whole of the democracy in Europe is present in spirit at his funeral obsequies, in the same way that it heartily voted for his re-election, and applauded the victory in the arms of which he has fallen. Democracy will identify itself wholly and directly with the monument which America will raise to him in the capital in which he cast down slavery. HENRI MARTIN.

[From the Siècle, April 30, 1865.]

I pause to pay a tribute of homage to the memory of that great and good man, ABRAHAM LINCOLN; he will have been the apostle and the martyr of freedom. The cause of slavery could only be put an end to by assassination It dies as it had lived, the dagger in hand. What a lost cause! What a dishonored cause! The frightful drama of Golgotha is the purchase of the disinherited. The blood of the just is invariably the ransom of slaves. EDMUND TEXIER.

[From the Siècle, May 2, 1865.]

We yesterday expressed our opinion that the legislative chambers had a great duty to perform; we are able to state to-day that that duty has been nobly accomplished. The words uttered by M. Rouher, minister of state, respond to the feelings of the whole of France.

The despatch of the minister of foreign affairs is written in the same spirit, and these two declarations corroborate each other, and perfectly agree with the national feeling.

The American republic is partly the work of France. Our most eminent fellow-citizens watched over it in its infancy. In troublous times it has served as a counterpoise to the omnipotence at sea which England pretended to exercise, who was then our rival, but now our ally.

When all the European parliaments had testified their sympathy with the United States, it would have been an anomaly if the legislative body of France failed to honor the martyr to progress, the firm and devoted virtuous man, who, in the midst of the horrors of a protracted civil war, never for a moment despaired of the future of the great cause of civilization, and who vigorously upheld the great principles of the American Constitution. Let us observe that the president of the legislative body, in carrying out the wishes of the government with respect to these communications, gave expression to noble sentiments, with which the chamber identified itself; and this unanimous concurrence is not the least significant symptom of the power of public opinion in our democratic France.

Frightful news reaches us at the moment of going to press. President LINCOLN has been assassinated; and an attempt has been made upon the life of Mr. Seward, but he survives. We wish we could doubt the correctness of these particulars, which, unfortunately, come to us in a form altogether affirmative.

We are not at all uneasy about the grandeur of the Union, nor in respect of American liberty. A ruined cause can never be sustained by crime, but every one will readily understand that the whole Union, in the south as in the north, is deeply wounded by the ball which has just carried off this great citizen in the midst of such critical circumstances.

[From the Temps, April 28, 1865]

The fresh and grievous details which we receive of the lamentable tragedy at Washington leaves scarcely any room for the doubt we expressed yesterday. The assassination perpetrated on President LINCOLN, on Mr. Seward, and intended for Mr. Stanton, Minister of War, and probably also for General Grant, is indeed the result of a political plot. American despatches confirm it,

and it is the unanimous impression of the English press. We cannot help remembering, besides, that the passions which have just struck down Mr. LINCOLN conspired against him at the time of his first election, and that on going from Springfield to Washington to be installed he was nearly being assassinated at Baltimore, in February, 1861.

Let us take care, however, not to fall into a too common error, and charge the whole of the southern people with the execrable crime which completes the downfall of their cause. No doubt there are many in the rebel States, many who do not repudiate with horror the atrocity of this vengeance, and many politicians who do not look upon the evil as irremediable.

How are we to understand, for example, that a man like General Lee, if he were not bound by his word of honor given to General Grant, if he still believed the struggle to be possible, would consent to resume his sword and place it again in the service of a cause dishonored by assassination? The wretches who killed Mr. LINCOLN have at the same time destroyed the South.

It is probable that they meditated more than a simple act of vengeance. In their eyes, perhaps, the chief crime of Mr. LINCOLN and Mr. Seward was not that they had triumphed over the South, but rather that they had proclaimed a policy of moderation and conciliation which would assure to the restored Union peace with foreign nations, and the respect of the world. To create irreconcilable hatred between the two sections of the Union; to exasperate the North; to replace temperate chiefs of the States by men of an opposite character; to substitute passion for wisdom, and to hurl the United States into the dangerous hazard peculiar to violence and anarchy-this was no doubt what they desired to effect, but in which they have not succeeded. They have misunderstood human nature, in taking no account of the horror which would be excited by their act, even in the south, and they have not the less misconceived the imperishable destiny of the United States. We associate ourselves with the general grief, but we share in no way whatever the apprehensions which we perceive are attached to it. The United States will not fail in any of the duties prescribed to them by the situation of affairs. The policy which Mr. LINCOLN and Mr. Seward have had the honor of sealing with their blood will be the policy of their successors; for the latter cannot deviate from it without making themselves the dupes and the accomplices of assassins.

A. NEFFTZER.

[From the Temps, May 1, 1865.]

After having registered the prompt and spontaneous manifestations which have taken place in the English, Italian, and Prussian parliaments, we at last hear something of the legislative chambers of France.

Nobody will have any difficulty in identifying himself with the sentiment