THE MEASURE OF THE DYNAMITE TERROR.
WHATEVER may be the value of the discoveries which the police hope that they are about to make with regard to the Dynamite Conspiracy, and whether the men now in custody be innocent or guilty, public attention is likely for some time to come to be turned pretty persistently in this direction. When the threats of the American-Irish were first uttered, the general disposition was to treat them as mere bravado. So far as results go, they may possibly still turn out to be mere bravado ; but it is clear that they are not mere bravado, in point of intention. The attempts that have been made from time to time to blow up public buildings and railway- stations show that the authors of these threats are really anxious to give effect to them. They may have over-rated the destructive force of the explosives they employ, or the courage of the human instrument to whom they are entrusted, or the means at the disposal of society for making their attempts harm- less. But if their powers turn out to be equal to their own willingness to use them' we shall in the future be very much better acquainted with dynamite than we are now. This is not a pleasant reflection, and as our capacity for meeting the danger successfully depends to some extent on the cool- ness we bring to the interview, it is worth while to consider what the risk really amounts to. Let us first see what may fairly be hoped for from the qualifying circumstances just referred to. As to the farce of the explosives employed, even dynamite turns out to be not so black as it has been painted. It is even doubtful whether, for the special uses to which it has lately been turned, it is very much superior to gunpowder. Guy Fawkes, if he could now return to earth, might not find him- self so much behind the age as the apostles of dynamite lila to think. For dynamite to work all the destruction of which it is capable, it needs to be applied under conditions which cannot be produced at will, and when these conditions are absent, the destruction wiought is, as actual experiment has shown, very far behind the hopes of the would-be destroyers. The courage of the men by whom the dynamite has to be applied, falls equally short of what is wanted to ensure the desired result. The dynamite has to be applied under conditions which will allow of their getting away safely. But for this, the prospect would be infinitely more for- midable. In the case, for example, of the explosions which were meant to come off at the railway-statione, if the men who left the portmanteaus at the cloak-rooms had been careless about their own escape, they could have made the success of all four attempts pretty nearly certain. As it was, their anxiety about themselves drove them• to resort to machinery, and machinery brought in a whole series of possi- bilities which might, and did, end in failure. There is no reason to suppose that this wholesome distaste for martyrdom will die out. It is only among the Nihilists that political passion is of a quality which despises death, and even among them the supply of martyrs does not seem inexhaustible. No doubt it is a little strange that these defects in the machinery should come so often, but it may be that in this way society is reaping an tmlooked-for benefit from one of its own vices. The pistols set to explode the charge of dynamite seem to have been made to sell, and since those who buy them are limited in their choice of men with whom to deal, and cannot complain very loudly if what they buy turns out; ill, the desire to sell a worthless article to a customer who must take pretty much what he is given, is likely to be a constant element in these bargains. Another point in favour of society is that the improvement that comes of practice is greater on the side of the defence than on the side of the attack. The authors of these ex- plosions have had all the time they thought necessary to make their preparations. They have chosen their own time for making a beginning, and this time may reasonably be taken to be the moment when they think all the conditions of the undertaking most promising. Among these conditions, one of the chief is that the police will be taken by surprise, and as soon as the first attempt has been made, the presence of this particular condition is less and less to be counted on. Practice, aided by the many weapons that the police are able to employ when once they have got on the trail, makes theni more and more perfect. We should expect the neat attempt to blow up a public office or a railway-station to break down even more completely than the last ; and when we compare the hopes that were doubtless cherished with the results obtained, that is saying a good deal. It is very much to our advantage that, for some reason, either of necessity or convenience, the present seat of the dynamite conspiracy seems to be France ; and weak as the French Government sometimes shows itself to those of its own criminals who can plead politics as a motive for their offence, it is under no temptation to display weakness towards Irish or American criminals who set up the same excuse.
We will go further, however, and inquire what would be our position if the dynamite faction were able to carry out their designs with the same impunity that falls to the lot of common-place criminals. Would even this involve any large addition to the sum of human woe We fancy not. When a novel terror first presents itself, we are apt to forget how large a part of the sting resides in its novelty,—resides, that is, in the one element of it which will certainly disappear as time goes on. If dynamite explosions came at very rare intervals, they might continue to inspire almost as much dread as they inspired at first. But they could only do this by recurring so seldom, that one would be forgotten by the time another was due ; and in this form they would cease, even in the imagina- tions of the most sanguine among their authors, to be of any political use. If they recur appreciably less seldom than this, we shall inevitably become familiar with them. If the Plague were to reappear in England, the popular terror would be something inconceivable. If the cholera were to reappear, the alarm would be very great. But an outbreak of typhoid or diphtheria, which in themselves are quite as mischievous as cholera, scarcely excites even local uneasiness. They are always with us, more or less, and we have consequently come to regard them as among the ordinary incidents of life. When a train was still something of a wonder, and coaches had not ceased to seem the natural means of loco- motion, it would have been hard to persuade people that they would grow so accustomed to railway accidents as to travel by train every week-day of their lives without the
least mental discomfort. Possibly, all these things count for something in the sum of human suffering. They may help, without our knowing it, to shorten our lives, or to make us grey before our time. But they do not affect us with any conscious unhappidess. To ourselves, we seem the same, whatever we may seem to the actuary or the hairdresser. So much for one of the three forms which the new terror would take,—danger to life or limb. As regards its other forms,— danger to property and danger to great works of art,—different sources of consolation are open to us. Supposing dynamite to do its worst, it will hardly more than double the danger to which property is already exposed from ordinary fires. Probably that is a very liberal allowance for the destruc- tion likely to be effected by it, and what does it really mean ? It means just this, that we shall pay as much again as we do now in the way of insurance premiums. Either dynamite will become one of the risks against which the existing Fire Offices undertake to hold us harmless, or new offices will be set up to undertake this new kind of insurance business. There is nothing very terrible in this prospect. There re- mains the danger to great works of art. What if the fabric of Westminster Abbey or the contents of the National Gallery should be destroyed by dynamite? No process of insurance would stand us in any stead here, for what we should want to recover would not be the value of the thing destroyed, but the thing itself. The consolation in this ease is that dynamite exploded outside a great building seems to do very little damage, while to explode dynamite inside such a building would imply an inconceivable amount of carelessness on the part of those who have the care of it. A railway-station has its weak point in its cloak-room; but in a church or a gallery it ought to be impossible to place any explosives so as not to be seen by those in charge. The measure of this risk is no more, we hope, than the additional sum it may cost to increase the number of keepers always on duty.
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