Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/79

 Rh manufactured in Fleet Street and other places where they print on occasions when the voice of threatened class-interests makes itself heard. An Archbishop was slain! Not merely a man, or a priest, or even a bishop, but actually an Archbishop!! If that does not "thrill" us what would? What mattered it that he was a hostage for the lives of tens of thousands of innocent persons previously murdered in cold blood, including many children, at whose massacre the "Civilised world" did not experience any symptom of that "thrill of horror and indignation" which invariably afflicts it when a representative of its own class-interests is killed!

It is a noteworthy circumstance how this "thrill of horror" accompanied by "indignation," "detestation," "abhorrence," and the rest of the vocabulary of penny-a lining Telegraphese, symptoms invariably following the assassination of some head of a State, never show themselves on the murder of a common domestic man through the official agency of the said State. For example, the "civilised world" duly thrilled over the knife in the late M. Carnot's liver, but we failed to observe any "thrill" after the recent fiendish murder by the cavalry officer of the Italian soldier Evangelista. Yet had the attempt on Signor Crispi's life been successful the "horror and indignation" tap would doubtless have been turned on as usual. Again, we did not notice any special symptoms of a "thrill of horror" over the deliberate shooting of a harmless passer-by by a Prussian sentry last year, for which the said sentry was specially rewarded by his sovereign! Had, instead, the sovereign had the misfortune to be shot at and killed by a political malcontent, we imagine the "civilised world" would have "thrilled" properly, with all the recognised accessory symptoms. If the prognosis