excites various emotions of wonder, admiration, longing, curiosity and even fear,—­for Paris is a witches’ cauldron in which Republicanism, Imperialism, Royalism, Communism and Socialism, are all thrown by the Fates to seethe together in a hellish broth of conflicting elements—­and the smoke of it ascends in reeking blasphemy to Heaven.  Not from its church-altars does the cry of “How long, O Lord, how long!” ascend nowadays,—­for its priests are more skilled in the use of the witty bon-mot or the polished sneer than in the power of the prophet’s appeal,—­it is from the Courts of Science that the warning note of terror sounds,—­the cold vast courts where reasoning thinkers wander, and learn, and deeply meditate, knowing that all their researches but go to prove the fact that apart from all creed and all forms of creed, Crime carries Punishment as surely as the seed is born with the flower,—­thinkers who are fully aware that not all the forces of all mankind, working with herculean insistence to support a Lie, can drive back the storm-cloud of the wrath of that “Unknown Quantity” called God, whose thunders do most terribly declare the truth “with power and great glory.”  “How long O Lord, how long!” Not long, we think, O friends!—­not long now shall we wait for the Divine Pronouncement of the End.  Hints of it are in the air,—­signs and portents of it are about us in our almost terrific discoveries of the invisible forces of Light and Sound,—­we are not given such tremendous powers to play with in our puny fashion for the convenience of making our brief lives easier to live and more interesting,—­no, there is some deeper reason,—­one, which in our heedless way of dancing over our own Earth-grave, we never dream of.  And we go on making our little plans, building our ships and making loud brags of our armies, and our skill, and our prowess both by land and sea, and our amazing importance to ourselves and to others,—­which importance has reached such a height at the present day as to make of us a veritable spectacle for Olympian laughter,—­ and we draw out our little sums of life from the Eternal exchequer, and add them up and try to obtain the highest interest for them, always forgetting to calculate that in making up the sum total, that mysterious “Unknown Quantity” will have to come in, and (un less it has been taken into due counting from the first) will be a figure likely to swamp the whole banking business.  And in this particular phase of speculation and exchange, Paris has long been playing a losing game.  So steadily has she lost, in honour, in prestige, in faith, in morals, in justice, in honesty and in cleanly living, that it does not seem possible she can ever retrieve herself.  Her men are dissolute,—­her women shameless—­her youth of both sexes depraved,—­ her laws are corrupt—­her arts de cadent—­her religion dead.  What next can be expected of her?—­or rather to what extent will Destiny permit her to go before the bolt of destruction falls?  “Thus far, and no farther” has ever been the Principle of Nature—­and Paris has almost touched the “Thus far.”