Hermann Stellmacher, Socialist, was on the 10th inst. convicted in
Vienna of murdering and robbing an old banker, his son, and another boy, and of killing Police-Agent Bloch, and was condemned to death. Stellmacher denied the murder of the banker, but admitted that of the police-agent, and made an elo- quent speech in Court, in which he argued that the sufferings of the poor gave them a clear right to take away the superfluous property of the rich. The use of force was, apparently, only a regrettable detail. He seemed fully to believe his own creed, and almost fainted with emotion as he described the poverty of his own relatives, one of whom had died of hunger. Would those Socialists who endorse Stellmacher's doctrine admit that any incurable invalid had a right to rob and murder any healthy person ? If not, why not ? Cancer is worse to bear than poverty. If it is so unjust that any should suffer hunger, is it not far more unjust that all, good and bad, alike should suffer death ? One reason, at all events, for the new growth of these fanaticisms is a decay of mental fortitude of which we see signs all around us. We shall have men de- ' claring ere long that all labour shall be voluntary, and that men who dislike it must be maintained at the public expense. They think it abominably cruel of Nature to supply no food except as the reward of long-continued toil, and would relegate the plough, like the rack, to a museum of antiquated instruments of torture.
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