THE TRAIN-WRECKERS OF NEW YORK.
latest story from America is a peculiarly horrible one;
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we do not know that there is any reason for the partial incredulity with which it has been received. Five men, it is said, whose names are given, who had been arrested for wrecking trains, have confessed that the charge is true, and have asserted that they were encouraged by the Society called the Knights of Labour, or much more probably, for the tele- grams may be unjust in their brevity, by some committee embedded in that organisation, and wholly unknown to a majority of its constituents, who recently included a mil- lion artisans. The accused say they were paid for their attempts by a member of the Society, who fled on their con- fession becoming public, and that the object was to compel certain Railway Companies to come to terms with the Unions to which their men belong. Such Companies, it appears to have been thought, would feel such a new risk too great, and would yield. The story, of course, may be utterly false, for the accused may have hoped, by implicating such a vast number of voters, to obtain powerful protection against further inquiry ; but we do not know that it is antecedently improbable. The wickedness is extreme to be committed for Such an end, but the deeds done are no worse than those acknowledged some twenty years ago by the chiefs of the Sawgrinders' Union at Sheffield, or those believed to have been repeatedly committed by Irish boycotters against defiant farmers and their families. Fifty years ago, bricklayers at war with their fellows upon trade issues found scaffoldings very unsafe, and buildings, with people in them, have been blown up before now after a great redaction of wages. There are, indeed, we believe, many instances in our own criminal reports of this very crime of train- wrecking being committed by discharged hands ; and it is only a degree worse than the offence, known to be fre- quent, of scuttling ships for the sake of their insurance- money. No month now passes on the Continent without a report of the use of dynamite against an employer's works, the explosion usually endangering many lives, and always those of the caretakers ; and the active section of the Russian Nihilists make trains the constant object of their most serious attacks. Slaughter, in fact, on a considerable scale is a frequent form of crime, either committed or attempted ; and we know of nothing in the position of railway passengers which should make their deaths especially alarming to criminals with atrophied consciences, or consciences sent to sleep by an illusion. It may be said that the victims are almost necessarily innocent, or, in the case of the drivers and guards, comrades of their assailants ; but that is true also of the relatives of all who are assassinated. The Railway Company is not innocent in the eyes of its gloomy enemies, and it is very doubtful if they ever lpok beyond it, any more than Orsini looked beyond Napoleon Di. to the crowd which was sure to be watching him, or than soldiers look beyond the enemy to the widows and orphans, they are about to make. Men whose imagina- tions present to them such distant pictures, do not, except in the rarest cases, commit violent crimes, and a large section of humanity has no imagination at all. The dyne- mitards always say that they regret the innocent, but that their suffering is "incidental," just as the sufferings of the affectionate are when their relatives pass away from natural causes. To care about them would be to make ex- plosions impossible ; and, consequently, those who employ those devices do not care. They see an end and a means, and they use the one to secure the other, without thinking much more of " incidents " than a General does when he orders the storm of a great city, full to repletion of the innocent. Indeed, we are not quite sure that the inno- cence of the victims does not help to blind such criminals to the special magnitude of their crimes. They feel themselves more free from personal malignity than ordinary murderers do, and are therefore, in their own eyes, more excusable. Soldiers do not like picking out men to kill, have, indeed, occasionally refused to do it, though they have no scruple in firing upon the abstract enemy. Wellington, if we remember rightly, on one occasion refused to allow Napoleon to be "picked off," though that would have terminated the war, and though the Emperor was, by the necessity of the case, infinitely more guilty of the war than any of his conscripts. Men who condemn themselves, condemn themselves for their motives, not for their acts; and the train-wreckers know that they do not sentence their unhappy victims to death or maiming because they bear them.
any personal bate. Half the slain, for all they know, may be
little children ; but that fact, which so horrifies the onlooking world, brings to them no reflection, except perhaps, "What a
pity such pets should be on board !" If it did, this particular crime would be impossible, and we all know that, whether the self-accused wreckers of New York committed it or not, it has been committed over and over again.
It is by no means certain that it will not become more fre- quent. Good people say, especially good people who have watched the more recent progress of the world, that men's "hearts," by which they mean their consciences, are becoming more impressionable; and we hope and believe that over long spaces of time that reassuring opinion is in some small measure true. It is undoubtedly true as regards the view taken of the sufferings of children, of the poor from poverty, and of those subjected to certain painful forms of disease. But we strongly suspect that there is one form of criminality about which the consciences of the majority have undergone little change,—or, rather, have become a trifle, or more than a trifle, harder than of old. Wherever the principle of collectivity comes in, men seem to us to feel the horror of crime less than they did, to be more inclined, however slightly, to say as Danton said : "Was, then, their blood," the blood of the victims of September, "so pure ? " This is certainly the ease with the public. They sympathise with tortured individuals, but not with tortured classes. More feeling was evoked by the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish, which was in a way unintended, than by the assassinations of all the victims of the boycotters put together. It is hard, indeed, in some quarters to get any sympathy for the latter at all, except as sympathy is be- stowed on the sufferers by an epidemic. They have perished, the idea is, in a sort of war, and one must grieve just as when war is in progress, but grieving pass on to business. The robbery of a man's spoons is a crime, but the robbery of rents from a whole class is an incident, and that with men who have not even the beginning of the notion that the collection of rent is brigandage, and that its products may justifiably be stolen. So far as this hardness is a product of caste hatred, it, of course, is nothing new—there have always been philanthropists who could not pity a King with cancer, or a priest with a whitlow—but we seem to see that the in- duration has spread farther, until it has affected thoee not influenced by caste feeling. We doubt if Royalists feel the misery of• Kings under the perpetual threat of violent death,.
as they would have done fifty years ago. "The Kings belong to a caste exposed to such things, just as soldiers are exposed
to shot, though we hope they may escape their destiny,"—
that is not an unfair account of the new form of the horror of crime committed against a caste because it is a caste, and by a whole class of persons. If this is the feeling of the public, and we cannot doubt it, though we may have justified our impression in badly chosen words, the change would naturally extend to criminals also. They would feel as if murder, even of the innocent, on a large scale for the sake of their own caste, were not quite so hopelessly evil as the murder of an individual out of greed, or revenge, or lust. Yet if there is a distinction, the former crime should be the worse, because of the deliberation, the careful reflection, indeed, and accurate reckoning-up of chances, with which it must be planned. That is a lamentable inci- dental effect of the advancing spirit of collectivity, which, on the popular theory, should be a merciful spirit, and, indeed, is merciful—especially to convicts and the idle—but it is not unnatural. The habit of " slumping " thousands together
destroys the sense of their individual humanity, which is the tree origin of the pity that spares and anoints with oil. The Samaritan would not have felt for his patient's city as he felt for the man himself. We all recognise that when a crowd of human beings, each of them with a body to suffer and a spirit to live again, is described after an encounter, say, with soldiers,
as "a mob ;" and it is true also of "landlords," "employers," "capitalists," "aristocrats," and "companies." These and many more have been made, by collective abuse or defence, so impersonal, that even those who murder them hardly feel as if, to use the picturesque expression of the poor, they had killed "Christians."
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