THE FEAR OF DYNAMITE.
THAT Dynamite should be greatly dreaded is natural, because anything which will destroy great numbers at once is greatly dreaded. The sympathy between human beings
is so strong, that a prospect of the simultaneous death of a large group creates more fear—or is it more agitation P—in each of them than the fear of death for himself only does. Good troops will not face fire which, in military phrase, has more than a certain " weight "—that is, kills more than its fair pro-
portion of men at once. Each soldier will face death for himself, but if it is to come to all dying at once, then he will not face it. English soldiers are panic-stricken if they fancy a. mine below them, though a mine can only inflict on each the death which each is prepared to encounter in the course of his duty, with no especial shrinking. English sailors are brava to recklessness, but the Admirals in the Crimea discovered and reported that the new shells " must be kept out," for if they are allowed to enter as they are in wooden ships, the sailors would not fight. The multitude of deaths occurring all at once in the confined space cowed them, as they were not cowed by equal, or nearly equal, risks from a succession of shots killing two or three men apiece. The inventors of the mitrailleuse rested the argument for their machine not so much on the number of men it would kill—for, of course, an increase of riflemen in number equal to the tubes of the mitrailleuse would kill as many—as on the moral effect of the destruction of so large a number at once. A mitrailleuse was really only a number of rifles in line, but its effect on the imagination was as if a new rifle had been made to fire ten scattering bullets at once. Indeed, the question is hardly arguable. Everybody feels that he would rather face a force which may kill one man of the regiment in three, than a force which, if it kills at all, will kill a third of the regiment at once. Whether he feels for the mul- titude, or, as cynics would say, fancies his own chance lessened, he fears the second force more ; and dynamite is a force of the second kind. It can kill crowds at once. It is, therefore, natural that it should be dreaded, until men have begun to exaggerate its powers to a rather absurd degred. Those powers are terribly great, within a certain range ; but, as we pointed out a fortnight since, there are limits to their action. No explosive
manufactured by man can pass through a mountain, or through the obstacle presented by the curvature in the earth's
surface; and the notion, therefore, of destroying London at a blow by an explosion of dynamite is simply preposterous. If all the nitro-glycerine in the world were exploded on Hamp- stead Heath, Westminster would be unaffected, except conceiv- ably as to its windows, which might be blown-in by the impact on the air. Indeed, Mr. George M. Roberts, Technical Manager of Nobel's Explosives Company—a company which plants its works in Ayrshire, to be well out of the way, and could, we imagine, tell strange stories of men's indifference to the chance of death—informs the world that the limit on the action of nitro-glycerine is very much closer than this. He has, no doubt, an interest in allaying an alarm which may threaten his works, by rendering it necessary to stop manufacture altogether ; but still he is an expert, with a scientific reputation to lose, and he tells us that the destroying force has been ascertained by experi- ment to decrease in such a ratio to the distance, that if on the spot it were represented by one million, at a hundred feet dis- tance it would be represented by only one. The ton becomes at that distance in its effective force only the thirtieth part of an ounce. " If a ton of dynamite were exploded in a London street, the effects would be felt severely in the immediate neighbourhood only of the explosion, and beyond that they would be confined to the mere breakage of windows." That is not quite the whole truth, because, as we know from the history of the explosion in Parliament Street, dynamite can exert a projecting force, and a -shower of blocks of masonry flung some hundred yards with the force of solid shot would be more destructive than the fire of any battery. Never- theless, Mr. Roberts' statement shows that natural terror has produced great exaggeration, and that entire cities cannot be destroyed, as people fancy, at a blow ; while the superstition that the Anarchists possess some unknown explosive of hitherto unimagined powers, is declared to be unfounded. There is no- thing stronger, Mr. Roberts affirms, than "blasting gelatine "- which cannot be made by unskilled persons—and the strength of this is only fractionally greater than that of nitro-glycerine, and only fifty per cent. higher than that of dynamite, which, again, is to gunpowder as eight to one. He does not affirm that no stronger exploding compound could be made, but evidently, with his large knowledge of the subject, believes that it has not been made.
So far, the awe inspired by dynamite is intelligible enough, even if we exclude, as we ought not to do, the political dread arising from it, akin to the dread, which so influences soldiers, of not only being killed, but defeated by new gnus ; but there is another question more difficult to answer. Why do men fear an explosive of this kind more than another cause of death P The statement may be denied, because so many men, with Colonel Majendie at their head, have recently shown that they can master the fear ; but it is, we imagine, true. We suspect, if we could interview Colonel Majendie, he would tell us that mixing nitro-glycerine " not clean of acid," and therefore " un- stable " to the last degree, with Hanoverian earth, was more nervous work than facing a battery; and that he would, on the whole, rather take death from a bullet than from a pail of the greasy hell-fire. At all events, there is one bit of evidence which everybody can test for himself. Have we a reader who does not think it rather braver of a policeman to carry about a carboy of nitro-glycerine than to charge a burglar pre- senting a revolver at his head? In the one case, the impression produced is that of courage, in the other, that of heroism; and yet in both cases the risk is the same,—the risk of an in- stantaneous death, which, moreover, would probably be more painless from the dynamite than from the revolver. What is the cause of the difference ? We believe it to be an effect produced on the imagination, whether of the man endangered, or of the man who reads about him, by three separate causes. One is the shock always produced by the belief that numbers must die, which, as we have seen, affects the bravest and most disciplined men, and which is the secret of the panic in indi- viduals caused by diseases like cholera, which notoriously are not so certainly mortal to any individual as, say, cancer, and nothing like so painful. Another is the special dread, or rather horror, created by unaccustomed modes of death, or death from -forces as yet little known or measured. The European public is not yet accustomed to dynamite, except as a blasting agent, and feels a little as if a new and specially fatal disease had broken out like a " black plague " in its midst. In its inexperience, it imagines for the victim tortures which could hardly exist, and general results which are a mere heaping together of improbable possibilities. In fact, it gives its imagination the rein, as it could not do if it were more experienced. Our correspondent, "M." evidently thinks that this is the whole reason of the fear of dynamite, and that if the world, when gunpowder was discovered, had been as sensitive or electric as it is now, it would have imagined from that dis- covery all the evils we now expect from dynamite. That is very shrewd, for undoubtedly the origin of the alarm is not a new force—gunpowder being dynamite with less power—so much as a new form of human wickedness, and if all dynamiteurs committed suicide from remorse, or retired penitent to con- vents, the new discovery would speedily be ranked with gun- powder, as nothing but a new resource. But still this is only a part of the truth, the horror being increased, as we have said, by the multitude endangered, and also by the absence of personality in dynamite. We expect it to ex- plode, and in most cases it has exploded, without any man there and then manipulating it. This might be quite as true of gunpowder, which also could be fired in barrels by slow fuses, but owing to its use in war and sport we do not think of it in that way. We expect to find a man behind the rifle or the revolver, and have a courage for the combat with man, however armed, which does not exist for a combat with a blind, speechless, and, so to speak, natural force. To face dynamite is to the imagination to face the light- ning, or an earthquake, or a lava-stream, or any other death-giver, before which fortitude is useless, and retreat not dishonourable. Nothing, not even habit, will give men courage in the presence of earthquake, though, like everything else, an earthquake can only kill you once; and to the imagina- tion the true analogue of earthquake is dynamite. It can give death when death has not been directly willed by any one, death by its own invisible, unaccountable, inexplicable rage; and man, under all circumstances, dreads the stone that can speak. The dread may diminish with time, if over long periods dynamite remains inert, as gunpowder does ; but whenever it is used, it will, we believe, revive. If meteorites were ten acres broad, and could kill mortals in heaps, men would fear them who do not fear bullets, and who would be willing, on good cause shown, to accompany forlorn-hopes. Death without the possibility of resistance is far more appalling than death with a fight for it, however hopeless, for it excites the imagination more.
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