THE WRONG AND RIGHT OF ASSASSINATION.
PEOPLE would look rather oddly at the man who exclaimed loudly that in his judgment murder was a crime and arson a very serious offence, yet the statement is made every day about political assassination and no one thinks it absurd. Not only exiles who wear long hair, and whom vulgar opinion therefore always suspects of everything from murder to coining, but even English. men who wear short hair and have accounts with their bankers think it necessary to purge themselves from the suspicion of approving political murder, and only this week a member of the British Government has found it expedient to assert that he thinks Emperors human, and shooting an Emperor therefore as criminal as shooting anybody else. Mr. Stansfeld was quite in the right in declaring his abhorrence, and the fact that he was so proves the existence of a lurking distrust in the public mind. People are so uncertain whether they do or do not in their own hearts excuse a political assassin, that they keep on asseverating their horror in order to keep their virtue up to an active point. They are conscious of an emotion, an instinct which Christianity rejects, and for which they cannot logically account, yet which forbids them to reckon Orsini among the criminals whom it is pleasant to hang. The man actually tried to commit not only a murder but a massacre, his bombs injuring more or less seriously one hundred and twenty persons, but we ask any candid man whether he feels or could feel towards Orsini as he felt towards the men hanged at Newgate last week. Many of the causes of that curious failure of moral strength lie deep in human nature, but the primary one is obvious, and of its kind almost unique. There are men increasing among us who question very strongly the importance of all human acts, who doubt whether, as Babbage once put it, every sound, however trifling, must, in the nature of things, go on spread- ing and spreading in successive waves over infinite space. It is worth their while to recall that, more than nineteen hundred years ago, forty-four years before the year One, a Roman aristocrat deemed it his duty to kill another Roman aristocrat who, as he thought, was ceasing to be one. Down through all succeeding ages has come the reverberation of that deed, demoralizing the opinion of fifty-seven generations of mankind. The crime of Brutus in killing Omar was an utter failure, for the murder, while it immediately produced a disastrous civil war, ultimately only transferred the Empire from a man of genius to a man of cunning —debased, without modifying, the organization of a world. Had Julius lived, Rome might have been governed by his heirs, and earth have escaped the opprobrium of having once been ruled by a Tiberius from Caprew. Yet though as clearly a blunder as a crime, though earth suffers to this hour from the effect of the bloody suspiciousness the deed inspired in every succeeding Caesar, the act of Brutus is still recounted without blame, still poisons the opinion of every child taught in a European school, still makes Englishmen doubt if Felton deserved immediate death, and Frenchmen wreathe laurels round the bust of Charlotte Corday. Christianity is powerless against the effect of a Pagan precedent, and as every new case occurs mankind have again to administer to themselves logical tonics to rebrace their capacity of horror.
There is the more necessity for those tonics, because, strange to say, this nineteenth century has witnessed what is really a new phenomenon, an attempt at assassination which, in failing, produced its desired effect. It had been the custom to assert that assassina- tion always failed, that the horror it produced strengthened the principles and the party it was proposed to upset. That undoubt- edly was the result of the great example, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and in a less degree of the murder of Henry IV. of France, and of Gustavus of Sweden. But Orsini's attempt did, so far as men can page, produce the effect he intended, did startle the Emperor of the French into recollecting his promises to Italy, did determine that hesitating intellect to exchange dreams for action. Even if the German flood pour once more over Italy, many Italians will hold that the three years' respite from oppression enjoyed by Lombardy and Bologna were worth the crime which secured them, while the visible Ch ince that a great country may enjoy independence, happiness, and prosperity as the result of an intended crime will for years cripple, if it does not destroy, the argument from inutility. Crime has succeeded once, why not again ?—the fact that it only succeeded because it failed, that bad Napoleon died Italy would not have been freed, slipping the public memory. The statement of Mr. Hennessy during the interpellations of Monday, that Mazzini did not mean murder, but did mean to keep up terror as a stimulus to Louis Napoleon to keep in the right path, showed, calumnious as it was, how deep has been the impression made by Orsini's success. Neither that success nor the instinctive tolera- tion of mankind can, in the very least, affect the moral aspect of political weuesaination ; but they make it advisable to consider once more the arguments by which fanatics seek to diminish that horror which, if we could but keep it always undiminished, would pre- vent finally all attempts of the kind. For it must be remembered, except in a case like that.of the Duke of Parma, which belongs to an utterly different category, no murder of a European ruler has ever been carried out by an uneducated man, by a man who did not justify his crime to himself by some argument derived from some law higher than ordinary morals.
The principle on which men unconsciously excuse to themselves the real turpitude of political murder seems to be something like this. The motive is not a personal one ; the assassin is not in- fluenced by any personal object ; his motive is the benefit of his country, and he is guilty, therefore, rather of an error of judgment than of a moral offence. To make this defence complete the vir- tuous assassin should always commit murder for the benefit of some country other than his own, and the perfection of regicidal disin- terestedness would be to kill for the benefit of an alien land a man whose continued life was beneficial to the assassin's own country— for a Dane, for example, to kill the Czar, because though friendly to Denmark he is tyrannical in Poland. As nobody ever com- mitted that act of criminal absurdity, it may be safely asserted that no murder was ever devoid of some slight tinge of selfishness, of at least as much selfishness as is involved in the very nature of patriot- ism. Admitting, however, that in exceedingly rare instances the balance of motive is disinterested, disinterestedness is at best a very partial justification for crime. Suppose a man to steal for the benefit of the poor. This case has frequently occurred, and has been justly held to show only that the criminal instead of a dead conscience had a perverted one. So if mere disinterestedness is a moral excuse for the murder of a king, it may also be moral excuse for that of a minister, or, indeed, of any man whose continued existence appears to any one person, he himself being judge, injurious to large masses of men. But it will be argued the assassin may not be simply disinterested, he may also be benevolent, may intend to confer an inestimable benefit on his country. There is no doubt that when a man with such a motive deliberately stakes his own life on such an act human nature refuses to class him with ordinary murderer's. But there is little doubt, also, that human nature in so refusing loses sight of some of the first principles of morality, the principle, for example, that life cannot be taken even by a tri- bunal without warning to the accused, and of the still greater prin- ciple that no man can innocently be at once prosecutor and judge. The easiest way, however, of bringing such questions home to us is by illustrations, and there is one of very singular force which bears directly on the matter, and on which public opinion acci- dentally happens to be unperverted. There is no doubt whatever that mankind regard with profound dislike the idea of assassinat- ing a general during war. Yet, suppose Alexander to have sent a Russian in 1813 to stab Napoleon in a street of Moscow ! Napoleon was an invader, his individual genius was essential to the success of the invasion, there could not be a doubt as to the beneficial effect upon Russia of such an act, yet the whole world would have cried shame on Alexander, and Mr. Pitt, when this very charge was brought against him by Napoleon expressed an indig- nation all good men feel to be just. Logically Alexander would have been defensible, but an instinctive feeling of mankind stronger than logic decrees that the obligation of fairness is per- manent, that war even in self-defence must be carried on fairly, that soldiers must not be killed by poisoned wells, or generals by weapons used at a time when the unexpectedness of the attack makes it an act of treachery. No possible case against a king— except the single one which caused the death of the Emperor Paul, that he was at once autocrat and lunatic—can be so strong as the case against an invading general, of a genius which excludes the possibility of replacing him, and opinion in a sound condition would, we believe, condemn the amesaination of the one as in- stinctively as that of the other.
If, indeed, it were possible that a man should possess full fore- knowledge of all the consequences of his act, should be certain that a King was ruining his country, that his death would stay that ruin, that the ruin involved crime on the King's part, and that the nation agreed as to the coming ruin and the crime it involved, he might possibly be justified in executing what would morally be a national decree,—nearly the exact situation in the case of Czar Paul,—but the mere statement of the essential conditions is sufficient to condemn almost every conceivable act of the kind.
In the affair which has caused the discussion the case is, of course, a great deal stronger. It is quite clear that if any right of aseassivation can exist at all—which we doubt—it cannot give an Italian the right to kill the sovereign of another country because he does not do quite enough to secure the prosperity of Italy. If M. Mazzini suborned M. Gallenga, as that gentleman, we believe, says he did, to kill Carlo Alberto he was guilty surely of a great crime ; but he, at least, attacked a man who, as he believed, was guilty of treason to his country. If, on the other hand, he suborned Greco to kill Louis Napoleon, he has not even the excuse of patriotism, for Napoleon was no more bound to free Italy than Lord Palmerston or the Czar. The excuse that he as a Carbonaro entered while still a young man into certain engagements is a sophism, for the united voice of mankind. absolves a man once elected king from every previous con- tract towards a people other than his own. Do the Reds mean to affirm that the House of Brunswick in declaring war on Germany would be guilty of treason ? The only defence for M. Mazzini is, to our minds, the simple one that he did not do the act alleged ; and the only subject of investigation is the matter of fact, not the motives for the fact. To our minds, we confess, the balance of evidence is clear, it is Mazzini's word against Greco's, and Max- zini, though he might be capable of ordering a political crime, is incapable of a personal falsehood.
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