TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE REVELATIONS IN DUBLIN.
WHAT is the use of affecting to doubt the evidence, especially James Carey's, just produced in the Kilmainham inquiry ? Nobody does at heart doubt it. A few Land Leaguers will say they do, and will dilate on the in- famous character of the witnesses ; but they will be regarded by all men, their own followers included, simply as advocates, pleading as they were expected to plead. Murderers on system who have at last told the truth have existed in all lands, witness our own Parliamentary inquiry into the assassinations in Sheffield, which were morally almost worse, because more sordid, than those in Ireland ; and the special baseness of Carey has very little bearing on the matter. About him, it may be admitted once for all, the maddest Irishman has justification for his rage. Upon his own showing, apart from all other evidence, he is either a worse Titus Oates, swearing away his own sworn comrades' lives, or a man who, not being pressed by want or provoked by personal wrong, assisted to organise systematic murders of men to whom he had so little enmity, that when one escaped, he took another for his victim with perfect indifference ; who planned and directed all details ; who rolled crime under his tongue as a morsel with cynical enjoyment, suggesting seriously that the knives used should be forwarded to the Exhibition, as " specimens of Irish industry ;" who proposed in the Town Council an address expressing horror at his own murders ; and who then turned on his confederates, and with testimony expressed in the clearest language, and pervaded by a kind of philosophic calm, doomed them to the gallows. No words, Irish or English, can do justice to a man who, though well understood in the East, where he has had many exemplars, is in Europe, God be thanked, exceptional ; but that, with experienced men, does not destroy his evidence. They know that such men revel in truth, when it is an offence to tell it ; they see how the evidence fits into the facts, and they believe that while any detail may be wrong as to individuals, and while much must still be concealed, the solid substance of the Informers' testi- mony is true. No one, even if as deeply interested in Irish extremists as the Freeman's Journal, doubts at heart that within the United Kingdom there exists a Society organised to murder any politicians whose death may increase the hos- tility between England and Ireland, and to keep up, for semi-social, semi-political objects, a reign of terror. The Society, be their instruments who they may, by the admis- sion of Irish Home-rulers would have slaughtered Lord Cowper and Mr. Forster, but for accidents which seem almost miracles—Mr. Forster, if Lord Clive was right, must still have a destiny before him—and they did slaughter Mr. Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish, and in intention Mr. Field. The only real doubts are as to the identity of those accused, as to the persons indirectly concerned, as to the ramifications of the Society, as to its relation to other bodies apparently only political ; and as the inquiry goes on, if the right methods are pursued, those doubts will all slowly and gradually be resolved.
The right method has been hit upon, we believe, by the Irish Government, and was hit upon more than a generation ago, by the singularly cool and merciful men who, after the unsleeping, unwatched, persistent effort of years, finally sup- pressed and still repress the system known as Thuggee,—per- haps the only grand system of crime ever crushed by men who were formally exempted by the criminals from all danger of personally suffering from its effects. The first law of every Thug was never to touch a European. The Thuggee Com- missioners relied, as all Governments in presence of murderous secret societies must rely, upon three great facts. It is nearly impossible for large numbers of men, with their consciences wounded, as every human conscience is wounded, by pre- needitated murder, not to desire, when under dread of death, to relieve them by confession. It is nearly impossible—we be- lieve, in the whole history of the Thuggee Department there has never been an instance—for such men so situated to burden their consciences afresh by elaborate lies. And it is quite impossible for many men, with no com- munication with each other, to invent the same detailed falsehoods. Ten clocks in a town may be all wrong, but if they all tell the same time, that is the true time of day, on the scheme of calculation accepted in that town. If, therefore, many men in a secret society are arrested and examined, their statements collated and combined, and then the whole result
made known to each, all will gradually come out. We doubt if the impulse to reveal is always fear, though fear may enter into it. The bad are often brave, and we see no good in slandering the- evil. The Thugs probably cared about death as little as other- Asiatics, and under many circumstances would, we doubt not, have gone in silence to the gallows or the stake. But once convinced that silence shields nothing, that all is known but details, that passionate desire for relief from a burden, which the Roman•. Catholic Church, wisely or foolishly, has utilised for ages, wakes in assassins to its full strength, and the narratives flow forth. as if driven out of the memory—always abnormally acute— by some interior power. It was clearly through the little- noticed clause in the Crimes Act allowing private examination that the revelations about these " Irish Invincibles " were obtained. There lies the secret of strength, and it is through that, and that only, that dangerous societies can be attacked by the State with solid hope of success. Menaces are overpowered by stronger threats. Rewards, even when they are extravagant, fall dead. Carey, recollect, comes in for no reward. Pardons have only a partial effect. It is- in the calm, scientific collection of evidence produced by interrogation that the secret of eliciting truth must lie, whoever and wherever the criminals may be. That alone breaks up the combination. There is nothing specially Irish in the matter, unless it be that in Ireland there is, as is pos- sible, a separate horror of death in sin. The Bavarian Judges, the Belgian Judges, the French Judges have never employed any other system ; and Bavarians, at all events, are in all ethnical peculiarities the very opposites of Irishmen. We repeat—fiercely as opinion is boiling—that there are no one- legged races, and that it is in human nature, and not in Irish nature, that we must seek for means to secure the victory to the Right.
Whether it would be wise to adopt the Thuggee Law into. our jurisprudence, is a question rather for statesmen and experts in the detection of crime than for journalists. We certainly would not adopt it as an exceptional law against Ireland. We loathe these exceptional laws, which at bottom reveal the deep distrust one section of the people entertain of another, and which we believe to intensify national hate as nothing else does. But we are not sure that the first principle of the Thuggee Law, that to be a Thug—that is, to belong to an association which you know intends murder—is a capital offence, is not a principle applicable to the whole United. Kingdom, and to every country in the world. Such a law, if, properly safeguarded by right of pardon, right of inflicting minor sentences, and right of the accused to bear testimony in. their own defence, is clearly in harmony with the first prin- ciples of morality and justice. No man whatever, under any provocation, can have any right to join such a society, and we can see no just liberty of Englishmen which such a law would infringe. Why should not an Englishman be questioned as to his share in such a society, his evidence be collated with other evidence, and he then fairly and openly, as in all other cases, be committed and tried? We see no objection, except in the freedom of arrest which such a law might- give to the Police, and a safeguard against that could be found by requiring a Judge's warrant, or the fiat of the Attorney- General. The true objection to such a law is the addition it would make to the long list of crimes, and unhappily this crime- has added itself. We English are bound, while we are raging about Ireland and its assassins, to remember that we had assassins here, that we could not cope with them, and that we crushed' them at last partly by removing grievances, and partly by con- cessions in the way of pardons which went to the very verge of compacts with crime, if they did not overstep it. The Saw-grinders never struck the great, and their history is therefore forgotten ; but it exists in Blue-books, and will teach all who read the ghastly narrative not to confuse the necessary and energetic punishment of crime
with questions of race or creed. Assassination Societies. must be crushed, and they can be crushed, if only Englishmen will remember that the obstacle is not their justice, or their mercy, or their political situation, but their slavish devdtion to methods of inquiry which are hopelessly at variance with circumstances. Suppose all Dublin in Mouravieff's hands. We should not have known one-tenth of what we know from allowing a quiet lawyer to ask questions and promise partial pardons. The men who plead for mere violence are at heart doubtful if the Societies in the struggle may not win. Non- sense! They cannot win, even in Russia, where all depends on. an individual; and in a free country, the only society which cannot be defeated, is never betrayed, and cannot be shut up, is the State. The State has only to use the powers at its disposal, without injustice, without violence, and, above all, without proscriptions, and it will strike down political assas- sination as easily as assassination for plunder. Fanatics ? Where is the trace of true fanaticism, in the whole ghastly affair ?
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