TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DYNAMITE BILL. THE living force remaining in our Parliamentary institu- tions was severely tested on Monday evening. The Houses were called upon to act rather like a Convention entrusted with power to do anything necessary for the safety of the people, than as deliberative bodies charged to discuss all proposals thoroughly before reducing them to law. One of those emer- gencies had occurred, happily so rare in our history, in which deliberation is in itself an evil, in which the thousand or more persons who make up the National Committee of Safety must act, instead of debating,—must recognise that the ship is on fire, and that the alternatives are obedience to the officers or a grand calamity. The Home Secretary informed the House of Commons on his responsibility that the rumoured plot for the destruction of London was a reality, that " the pirates of the human race "—they are rather its enemies, for pirates seek plunder—were preparing to use those malignant gifts of science, the new explosives, for the destruction of parts of the capital ; that though many had been arrested, fresh agents were immediately expected to arrive, and that the law was insufficient to enable the Government to deal with them. It was necessary to act at once, and to depart from many cherished principles of English legislation. He called upon them to authorise the prisoner to claim the right of giving evidence, to enable the Magistrates to insist on answers criminating a witness—though such answers will not be produced against him—to sanction inquiries on oath when no one is in custody, to make British subjects responsible for acts done abroad, to make illicit possession of explosives of itself a felony punishable with fourteen years' penal servitude, and to declare design when accompanied by preparation equivalent to successful action. There was material for a night's debate in every clause of the Bill, and in ordinary times parties would have divided in defence of or attack on every new principle it implies. There was, too, exactly that condition of parties which might tempt such a division. The regular Opposition is eager for chances of effective debate, and not indisposed to waste time during which it is supposed that the popularity of the Government is diminishing. An irregular opposition of Free Lances, composed of four clever aspirants, and six or seven eccentrics, bores, and Irre- concileables, is favourable to veiled obstruction as an effective policy. More than thirty Irish Members have shown that they consider Obstruction a weapon to be used on behalf of Ireland, and were suspected—unfairly, we believe, as regards the majority—of considering Sir W. Harcourt's " pirates " a forlorn-hope from their own army. Debate, which would be equivalent to failure, seemed eminently possible until the Houses sat ; but once assembled, the Houses acted as if obstruction had never been a possi- bility. One single voice, that of the Tory Chief in the Lords, was heard in protest against rapid legislation ; and for the rest, both Houses were unanimous. The Tories helped on the Bill heartily. The Irish Irreconcileables stayed away. The Fourth Party, the eccentrics, and the bores cowered before what they felt to be the national command, and a Bill which in principle is as stringent as any ever passed for the repression of crime in Ireland, a Bill which is really a milder Thuggee law, was swept through both Houses in a night, and was law on the following morning. And it would have been law had any one of the smaller factions ventured to oppose, for they would, in the determined mood of the Houses and the country, have been silenced or expelled, without consideration for any consequences, except the passing of the Bill. Parlia- ment, in fact, showed itself a true exponent of the feelings of the people, rose to the height of the national danger, and met the declaration of war hurled at the country by the enemies of society with all the vigour and, we need not say, with five times the force that could have been displayed by any form of Dictatorship. The Houses were not carried away, either. The Bill is pronounced by the watchful Americans, who on many occasions play to England the part of posterity, "very mild," the single clause which might be perverted was pointed out, and the merciful clause, which allows the accused to give his own evidence in contradiction to that of accusers, a right invaluable when motive is so completely the essence of the crime, was passed as readily as the clauses which punish. Whether the Bill is an adequate Bill, remains to be proved; but we think it is. There is no moral reason in the world against inflicting death on those who prepare explosions of which death is an intended or is certain to be an incidental' consequence ; but there are reasons of expediency against it, the strongest being the difficulty of retaining extreme measures as permanent parts of the law. The present conspiracy, if experience may be trusted, will come shortly to an end, the excessive tension involved acting on the conspirators like a nervous disease ; .but the danger from science in malignant hands must remain permanent. Human curiosity, which we dignify so often with such fine names, has undone the casket, and the released Genius cannot be again con- fined. Scoundrels of all kinds are aware of nitro-glycerine, and all safeguards against crime are impaired thereby. No antidote is possible to the nitricized combustibles, or to those, still more dangerous, which do not destroy, but burn or asphyxiate—vide Colonel Majendie's effort to destroy the contents of the Birmingham carboys—and the preventive laws must not, therefore, offend the national conscience in its normal state. The punishments are suffi- cient, and the real object of the Act, which is to untie the hands of the official investigators, who form our first line of defence, is most ably pursued. It is in prevention, it must not be forgotten, that safety is to be found. The Dynamiteurs —we had better adopt the French word at once—may yet secure, what they have not yet secured, fanatics as agents, and then punishment will not be of much avail. It is to prevention we must look, and the Bill authorises search as it would be authorised in a magazine with lucifers suspected to be hidden therein, enables Magistrates to take evidence at discretion, to correlate evidence, and to question criminal witnesses, and, in short, does everything that Irish experience has proved to be of value. These powers will be ably used. There are plenty of Magistrates in England with Mr- Jenkinson's special faculty for tracing out crime—though Government was beaten by some of the worse Trades' Unions—and the Police, under the new call upon their energies, are developing quite unexpected force. Their behaviour in presence of the new danger, which, it must be remembered, keenly affects the imagination, has been splendid, and has called out deserved encomiums in every Continental capital. Sergeants not specially picked travel miles with sleeping volcanoes between their knees, which, as they know, an extra rough jolt or an overturn might suddenly make active. They enter buildings which could in an instant be blown, with themselves, to atoms, with- out a shade of hesitation ; and watch places compared with which a powder magazine is a secure residence, for weeks, with unflagging zeal. One policeman in particular seems to have chosen a house which he knew, " from his chemical studies," to be perpetually exporting nitro-glycerine, as the proper place for him to sleep near. The work of detec- tion, too, appears to have been honourably as well as vigilantly- done, there being no trace of the employment of agents pro- vocateurs, and no squeamishness whatever in ascertaining facts- The former device cannot be justified by any danger ; but mere search, however secret, is, when legal, exactly on the same foot- ing as the opening of letters under a Home-Office Warrant,— that is, it is a regrettable expedient, to be adopted only when the public safety requires, but then not to be neglected. That safety does require that a suspicion of manufacturing hun- dredweights of nitro-glycerine should be rebutted or con- firmed, even though skeleton keys have to be employed by responsible officers in the process. With the new energy of the Police, the new powers of the Justices, and the aroused vigilance of the working-classes—who entirely object to have their children blown up at the bidding of persons in safety at a distance—and with steady avoidance of panic, we may, we believe, keep the enemy at a distance. If not, it must not be forgotten that English mining industries went on very well before nitro-glycerine was discovered, and that we cannot afford to cheapen stone, and slate, and coal, and tunnel work at any expenditure of uninterested human life. The explosion of cities must be prevented, if we have to buy up all the dynamite factories in the country, and make the Govern- ment sole manufacturer and possessor of the new artillery. States are not bound by any commercial consideration what- ever to allow of private war, any more than they are bound to allow the construction of tunnels which may prevent sea- sickness, at the cost of a conscription.
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