SOCIAL SPITE ON THE CONTINENT.
THE Parisians are quite right in their instinctive inquiry as to the motive of the recent dynamite outrages. The motive is not only the intellectually interesting point,, but it is the important one too. Until the motive is discovered for such crimes, it is useless to try to meet them with special laws, or even to take measures of special precaution. If they are the result of individual spite, they are no more formidable to society than any other attempts at assassination ; if they are the acts of an insane or fanatic individual, the single object should be his discovery or arrest ; while if they are the out- come of a spite which extends to entire castes, they indicate a social danger of the most formidable kind. We confess that as yet we incline to the last, or pessimist conclusion. The first attempt was one to blow up the house of the Princesse de Sagan with a bomb placed against a corner, which failed, and therefore attracted only a momentary attention. The police ascertained, however, that the attempt was a serious one, that a bomb filled with one of the new scientific explo- sives had been employed, and that the only cause of failure was the absence of sufficient resistance ; that the bomb, in fact, had only shattered air, and projecting bits of stone. They could not, however, discover that the Princess had any enemies, or that any one in her household was likely to be the intended victim of a feud ; and they came, it is believed, to the conclusion that the house was selected merely because
its owner was conspicuous, and lived in visible luxury while so many were in want. In the second case, that of Friday week, the house attacked was the residence of many prosperous families, and the Judge below whose rooms the bomb had been placed had taken a professional part in the prosecution of some
Anarchists. That outrage might, therefore, be due to personal spite; but the criminal classes rarely hate the professionals employed against them, considering that, like the police, they only earn their living; and the attack may have been directed only against a rich house, selected because Maitre Benoit hap- pened to occupy one floor. In the third case, the motive cannot have been either personal spite or enmity to the rich, for the place selected was a window outside the eating-room of a soldiers, barrack, which was completely wrecked, not by a dynamite- bomb, but by a much smaller case, or large cartridge of copper, filled, it is believed, with picrate, an explosive having eight or ten times the shattering force of dynamite. Any one soldier may, of course, have a deadly enemy, but it is most improbable that if he had, the enemy would attempt to shatter a whole group, or that he would also have an enmity to the Princess de Sagan, and to the occupants or owner of the house in which Maitre Benoit resided. The total drift of the evidence is, therefore, towards the conclusion either that an individual is endeavouring by a series of explosions to produce social alarm, or wreak a furious vengeance on the social system ; or that a society, probably small but utterly fanatical, has com- menced what it thinks a social war. The second conclusion is the more probable,—first, because the explosives used differ in kind, while an individual would probably repeat himself ; and secondly, because the objects of attack were so different that they must have attracted or irritated very different minds. The reasoning is perhaps a little over-subtle, but it has evidently impressed the Parisians, who know their own fellow-citizens ; and the Cabinet, who through the Premier have attributed the attack to "Anarchists "—that is, persons seeking the destruction of all that exists by violent means— have searched the rooms of all known Anarchists, and have suggested that it would be well to include the firing of explo- sives within a dwelling-house, even if no death should follow, among the crimes which the Code punishes with the guillotine.
Judging as mere outsiders, we should say the conclusion of the Government is the correct one. The notion of a personal vengeance may be set aside, as no one could have quarrels with so many and such different people as those threatened by the attacks. It is conceivable, of course, that an indi- vidual possessed of much chemical knowledge, and animated by a semi-insane hatred of society, may be responsible for all the outrages ; but it is most improbable, for the instruments employed are difficult to make, and the maker would have been suspected by the artisans he employed. It is far more probable that one of the many fanatical clubs known to exist in Paris counts a laboratory employe and some artisans in the manufacture of explosives among its members, and growing tired of futile talk, has endeavoured to produce the most exciting explosions possible, one against a leader of society, another against a whole group of cultured bourgeois, and a third against soldiers, the last object being selected, not from hatred of soldiers, but as most certain to create an agitation among officials and in the Chamber.
If this, which is the most popular theory, should prove correct, Parisians have reason for their panic, for it would prove the existence among them of a Society intent on destroying property and life in order solely to create alarm, a desire which can never be satiated, and possessed of sufficient means and intelligence to carry out its purpose with success. The danger from such a Society is, of course, limitless, for its operations are not confined either as to time or place; its object can never be attained until society has been dissolved by sheer terror; and though it may be paralysed by want of means, the extent of its means can only be vaguely guessed by assuming that well-to-do persons, or any persons not suffering in their own fancy from the crushing weight of society, would never run for an impersonal object such tremendous risks. The Society may be in possession of a store of explosives, and the manufacture of the bombs or cartridges, though it takes time, is not an expensive process. Explosion after explosion may shake the city for a year, and still the police, unless aided by accident, which has so far failed them, may be without a clue. Indeed, it is one of the elements of the new terror thus intro- duced into life that the protecting power of the police almost wholly fails. The Society, if it exists, is almost certainly com- posed of fanatics who will neither drink hard nor betray each other, and so risk the sudden execution by which every Society of the kind has always punished traitors. If there are women in it, they are women of the same opinions; and the history of Nihilism shows that female conspirators are, on the whole, rather less likely to be guilty of treachery than their male comrades. The police, therefore, would have no information, and without information how are they to protect anybody or any place, except, indeed, by standing sentry, a function which, in a city like Paris, it is impossible to perform at all effectually? They cannot arrest a whole population to see if they have bombs in their pockets; and, indeed, if they did, on ninety days out of ninety-one those they arrested would be without a particle of evidence on their persons. Increased severity of punishment is useless, for the State can only inflict death; and so can the Society, which, both by its punish- ments and its opinions, is nearly, if not quite, beyond the influence of bribes. There are no means of protec- tion which decent people can use, and Parisians have only to wait quietly till accident, say through a death-bed statement, reveals their foes, and to hope that they are very few, and may, like many criminal societies, owing to their necessarily fierce suspicion of each other, quarrel among themselves.
Are they so very few ? It should be so, for deeds such as are attributed to the fiercer Anarchists require a mixture of courage, callousness, intelligence, and semi-insane fanaticism which must be very rare ; and yet we cannot feel absolutely certain. The genuine Terrorists were not so very few —there were four thousand in the Jacobin "Company,"
which traversed France committing murders everywhere— and we see many signs on the Continent, and especially in France, which make us suspect that the spirit which inspired the more fanatic Terrorists, the spirit of caste hatred, modified but increased by intelligence, is abroad once more. Envy, sharpened by positive suffering from poverty, and fed incessantly by dreams of the happiness possible in a new society, has bred in certain classes of the Continent a hatred towards the luxurious and the comfortable which in its malignant intensity resembles rather the popular hatred towards Jews in the Middle Ages, or towards priests during the first outbreak of the Revolution, than any malice enter- tained towards individuals. It seems to kill pity, and ex- tinguish, as regards the hated classes—that is, in this case, all who are either well-to-do, or, like the soldiers and police, are organised—all that sense of civic right and wrong which we usually suppose to be the inevitable product of civilisation. The active Terrorists—we do not mean the leaders, but their agents—are described by all observers as having been posi- tively drunk with hatred, and in places, Lyons especially, they did deeds such as would a priori have been described as impossible to humanity. We do not know any final reason why they should not have reappeared. It may be said that the terrible social oppression which developed them has passed away; but those are oppressed who sincerely think themselves oppressed, and a section of the Continental poor have learned to consider themselves oppressed by " society " in a way which they think devilish. Marat's lan- guage was mild when compared with that which a few Anarchists are not ashamed to print and buy. There is no more religion among some of them now than there was then, or rather, there is less, for the hatred then felt towards the Church has been transferred towards religion itself, which is denounced even in public places, and occasionally in the Chamber, in language which suggests that those who use it are not so much atheists as haters of the unseen force which still inspires them with fear. It may be said that men have grown milder; but though that is true of great classes, it may not be so true of minute ones ; and very decent men grow cruel when actuated by panic, as witness the Deputies who are going to vote the guillotine for explosions unattended by murder. We are quite confident that the majority of men in France have improved in all but a fierce greediness for comfort—though the German invasion did frightful evil in hardening men, as witness the scenes which followed the suppression of the Commune, scenes nearly as bad as those enacted in the suppression of the heretics of Toulouse—but we see no proof that an evil substratum, not a thick one, but still perceptible, may not still continue to exist in society ; and if it does, science has placed terrible weapons in its hands. A man can already scatter death from a cartridge of picrate without danger to himself. Nor has science yet reached the limit of its range. Chemists know well that there are explosives ten times as deadly as any yet dis- covered, which are only not manufactured because the secret of securing safety during the process has hitherto escaped the experts, who, daring as they are, all want to see the fruit of their own discoveries, and therefore object to more than a certain proportion of risk. There is truth is there not, in those stories about the asphyxiating fumes to be obtained from osmium which throw the legends as to Captain Warner's deadly vapour far into the shade ; and aluminium cannot be obtained without osmium also. It is not only possible, but exceedingly probable, that within ten years "beneficent science" will have invented an explosive cartridge which can be safely carried in the waistcoat-pocket, yet which when exploded would destroy a house, and that the invention will be within the power of any plumber or gasfitter to reproduce. Such instruments will be as powerful in bad hands as in good, and though the good are, as we believe, far the stronger, because only they can permanently unite, we at least can see no way in which their strength could avail them as against remorseless enemies, however few. They could not in practice kill them out, though Senor Canovas recently threatened to do it—at least, the Madrid bulletin-makers said so—and what other device is there which would prevent any man at war with society, and callous as an automaton, from using osmium pellets, and watching in safety their result ? It is a lurid picture to draw, but we do not believe in the beneficence of science, and should never be surprised to see the pride of intellect receive a lesson through a consciousness of vast
unhappiness due to its own agency. Paris will, we dare say, survive its new foes, though with an added apprehension at its heart; but we note that explosions, both in France and Austria, grow more frequent ; we are sure that the social passion, which is envy, is neither dead nor dying ; we believe that the science of explosives, which slept so long after the discovery of gunpowder had annihilated the power of the men in armour, is once more awake and vigorous; and we cannot but mark that, as regards this new crime, detection lags far behind offending. If the motive of recent outrages is caste spite, Paris, and the whole Continent, have reason for
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