From the Opinion Nationale

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, be fore 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 legitimate 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. [Page 133] It is the black race redeemed by the blood of the just, and it is especially the inviolability of human life that will be benefitted 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.