THESECRET MOTIVE OF SECRET SOCIETIES.
THE motives which impel ordinary men, and especially ordinary men without personal wrongs to avenge, to enter Secret Societies embodied with an intention to kill are doubtless many and diverse ; but, we take it, the dominant one in all is the desire for power. There are probably in all such societies, especially at first, a few men with wrongs to avenge, or a few victims of true fanaticism,—that is, men dominated by an idea which, like a monomania, masters alike conscience and brain ; but the majority are of a mach more frequent and, so to speak, vulgar type. In a time and place of Secret Societies, a strong-willed man, full of desire to be somebody, to be efficient, to exercise real and direct power, knows that if he enters such a society and rises high, his ambition will speedily be gratified to the fullest extent. With little money, no birth, and no ascendency abroad, he may within 'and through the Society exercise a power which, to him who wields it, must seem tremendous, far transcending the power of any Minister or any General. The power, it must be remembered, is necessarily far greater in his eyes than in those of any out- sider. The world knows only his acts, but he knows also his own designs, and in their easy prospect of realisation they appear to him like acts. He feels, in not killing, as if he had spared. The world sees that a man, possibly a great man, has fallen ; but the man who made him fall feels as if anybody might fall at his signal, as if he were distributing death and life, were an arbiter of destiny, a potentate secretly wielding the lightning at his will. He feels almost like a deity. "There is the great official, full of rank, and honour, and wealth, whose word is so weighty, and his person so rever- enced ; and I, whom nobody knows, who am but on& of the humble, a man always in shadow, can with a word reduce him to mere clay. There is that other, still greater, and I pass him by, and he does not know that he has been enveloped in lightning made powerless by my hand." That was, it is known, the feeling of Thomassen, the " monster " of Bremer- haven, who delighted in dining with passengers about to sail in ships which he had doomed by his clock-work apparatus to sink in mid-ocean ; and that is the attraction which, as all their confessions attest, has always carried away suc- cessful poisoners. They feel the sense of power in its most concentrated and extatic form, power over the issues of life and death, the power which, to whomsoever it belongs, be he Caesar, or Sultan, or criminal, separates him utterly from his kind. The leading spirit of a Secret Society enjoys that, and in a higher degree than the poisoner, for he can act by others, and even at a distance, and his volition does not therefore seem to himself impeded and weakened in its thunderbolt character by the small trickeries and precautions and petty efforts essential to the poisoner's success. He wills like a despot ; and the victim falls. That is the luxury of the position, and we can easily conceive that to men with a strong thirst for power—and that thirst is in some men the most in- tense of all cravings—with steady nerves, and indurated hearts, that fascination may be nearly irresistible, more especially as there is added to it another, the fascination so sovereign with a large section of mankind—with one-half, for example, of all English gentlemen—the fascination of hunting game which may turn and rend them. No elephant, no tiger, can rend the hunts- man, as the great official can rend assassins, if they spring and miss their mark. All the evidence given at Kilmainham suggests that when the assassins were hunting Mr. Forster or Mr. Burke, the dominant sense among them was that of being engaged in a battue of very large and very dangerous game. Carey in particular, throughout his narrative, tells of his arrang- ing signals and giving signals, and marking distances, and re- tiring to safe points of observation, exactly as he would have told of some grand tiger-hunt, in which he was so inter- ested that no detail escaped him, yet in which it was expedient that the actual conflict should be left to stronger hands. The Indian Thugs all showed this feeling in the strongest form, all avowed that they were huntsmen, all declared that there was no " shikar " like theirs, at once so dan- gerous and so exciting, and once their tongues were loosened, all described their sport with the minuteness and accuracy with which a man who has been after tigers recalls the details of the chase. Twenty years after, a Thug would remember every detail, down to the minutest personal marks upon his victim, just as twenty years after "the Old Shekarry " could describe with unfailing accuracy every detail of a dangerous hunt after bear, or tiger, or anaconda, every stumble his elephant made, every shot that was fired, every mark in the slaughtered game. To distribute life and death, and to distribute it so, was a gratification which attracted into such societies men wbo were neither fanatics, nor conscious of an undying grievance, nor, as we believe, in many cases, full of political hate. With such men, we suspect fidelity to associates is never very strong. They do not think of them in their hearts as associates, but as instruments. punish them remorselessly when they fail to act, or betray them ; but break them, when they are useless, as readily as any other weapons. What are they ? Rifles in the grand shikar. Mr. Bosworth Smith, in his new "Life of Lord
Lawrence," tells how a petty prince ordered an enemy to be killed, and sent with the murderer a runner, to give aid or to report. The man, utterly faithful to the prince, saw the deed done, and ran ninety miles continuously to his master to report success, was received with delight, and dismissed, and then,— and then stooped down to raise the carpet portiere of his master's chamber, certain that he should hear the order for his own assassination. It came, as he expected, and he fled on faster than the prince's horsemen, to his own home in the mountains, to relate the story to John Lawrence. That prince was bat Carey in another clime, and his order as to his runner would create in his principality as little surprise as it did in the runner himself, who yet flew on to the betrayal he knew to be so nearly certain. Why, under such circumstances, confidence exists at all, why the runner serves the prince, why, in an Irish Secret Society, any one trusts any one else, is only to be explained by the belief each man entertains that the catastrophe will not happen to him, that he will be successful, and that, being successful, faith will be kept.
But the conscience ? The conscience of the despot who is often inflicting unjust penalties does not seem to wake while he is inflicting them, nor does that of brigands. If there is one thing certain in the history of crime, it is that habitual murder acts like some powerful drug as a stupifier to the con- science. The great poisoners have seldom betrayed a trace of it, or the great pirates, or the great brigands. That it can wake, even in such men, we firmly believe; but it is slow to waken. The Thugs, who seem, while their career lasts, abso- lutely without it, do, we believe, after years of their quiet, in- dustrious seclusion—they all make tents for the Army—show most distinct traces of it, traces so deep that their experienced watchers will not allow visitors to allude to their crimes ; but it wakes more slowly than in any class of criminals. It impels them to confession, to an abstinence from small crimes—a striking peculiarity of the Thugs, as of many of the worst French Terrorists—but not, till the stupefaction has passed away, to personal remorse. We can offer no explanation of the phenomenon, except the very obvious one that no man in whom conscience was vigorous would join such a society, or the possible hypothesis that to such a man a human being does actually become, as it were, game; but of the fact there can be no question, and its existence is one more justification of the horror with which mankind regards such associations. We all know the tremendous effect of opinion upon conscience, frequently almost stupefying it permanently ; and such associa- tions, it would seem certain, generate within themselves an opinion under which the sense of criminality in murder dis- appears,—an opinion, doubtless, helped by the internal law dooming every recalcitrant to death, and so producing the feeling that crime is not crime, but only obedience to irresistible necessity. Carey, as yet, is only anxious to defend himself from the charge of being "an informer." Years hence, the pressure on his conscience will be other than that; but till then, there is in all who take up assassination as a work a blood- drunkenness.
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