THE ALDERSGATE EXPLOSION.
ERE is something distinctly alarming about the evidence given on Monday as to the cause of the recent explosion in the Aldersgate Station of the Metropolitan Railway. There seems to be no longer any hope that it was due to accident or carelessness, or even to malignity directed against any individual. Sir Vivian Majendie is probably the greatest expert in explosives now employed by a European State, and he stated distinctly that the explosion was not caused by gas, that it could not have been produced by gunpowder, and that, in fact, it came from a bag or vessel, the material of which cannot be ascertained, filled with one of the high explosives. Con- sequently a man carried it on to the train, placed it under the seat of a carriage, and lighted the fuse, in- tending deliberately to destroy as many lives and as much property as he could. That is, as Sir Vivian rightly said, " formidable " news, for the man withdrew at Farringdon Street unsuspected, and was instantly lost in the whirlpool of London, the chance of discovering him or his motive being almost infinitely remote. The chances are a hundred to one that he is a foreign Anarchist ; that he is a man of some culture, for ignorant men cannot deal with these explosives, and his whole procedure indicates shrewdness ; that his object was to create alarm in a bourgeois society, Kings and Ministers not travelling by the Under- ground Railway ; and that he has confederates who, whether aware of his particular design or not, approved its principle and applauded its success. He belonged, in fact, to the faction which produced the man who, merely to create alarm, attempted to blow up Greenwich Observatory, but, through some carelessness or through providential interposition, was blown up himself. As the man who blew up the train at Aldersgate Street was uninjured by the explosion, and is still entirely unknown, it is certain that he can make and carry his explosive safely, and there is consequently nothing what- ever to prevent him, or any associate with the same malignity and nerve, from repeating the outrage whenever he sees fit,—say on the day of the Jubilee celebration. It is impossible to take any more precautions for watching the trains than are already taken, unless indeed we super- sede carriages in compartments by corridor carriages which can be patrolled ; we cannot increase the severity of the punishment, which, if any one is killed, is already death by hanging ; and it is hard to see how the vigilance of the police could be further stimulated. They have every motive to exert themselves, they already employ the best agents obtainable, and they are absolutely free even from the suspicion of any sympathy with such crimes, which inflict on their body an enormous amount of trouble and suspicion. Nor can the restrictions on the manufacture of explosives be usefully increased. The assassins know how to make their shells out of articles in frequent use, and no extent of supervision over dynamite factories or chemists' shops would prevent their obtaining the necessary materials. Rewards or pardons are of little value in fighting fanatics or persons who can inflict death for treachery, and we cannot, as is reported to have been done in one case in Spain, obtain evidence by the torture of suspected men. Society, in fact, is to all appearance beaten, and if the miscreants are numerous, or are content with the effect of their attempts, society may yet have some serious calamities to endure. We do not care to discuss the outrages which desperadoes armed with weapons such as the one which exploded in Alders- gate could attempt, but it is on the face of the facts that they could surround all railway travelling with new dangers of a kind appealing forcibly to the imagination, and therefore arresting passenger traffic. Frequent ex- plosions would, in fact, almost prohibit travel, or compel the railway companies for a time to encounter the immense expense and inconvenience of placing a watchful guard in every compartment which appeared likely to start without passengers, nearly an impossibility on the shorter surburban lines.
The only protection for the public against criminal attempts of this kind consists, in fact, in the rarity of the special kind of criminal who is prepared to make them. The number of persons who would commit crime for an adequate gain to themselves is probably very considerable, but the number of criminals who are, so to speak, unselfish, and free of any personal wish except to gratify a ran- corous hatred of society in the abstract, and who are at the same time instructed chemists, and also without nerves, cannot be very large. They have not even the temptation which so affects the majority of tyrannicides, the hope of a " delicious" notoriety, or even of living in history as persons who had deflected its course. If discovered they are ordinary murderers of obscure persons, and if undis- covered they are left absolutely without reward except that of feeling that they have committed shocking crimes without producing the smallest result except misery to unimportant individuals. The sociallsystem is too strong to be shattered by any explosion, even if it blew down St. Paul's. There must be very few persons in whom bloodthirstiness, a sort of unselfishness, a kind of courage, and a desire to avoid all penalties for themselves at any risk to the innocent, can be so inextricably mingled and accom- panied with such defect of reasoning power. If they could reason like other men they would see that, while some assassinations have had great effect, no explosion directed against society has had any result, except to in- crease the resolution of society to defend itself and its harshness in devising expedients for that end. Such criminals must be few. That there should be any is a strange commentary on the progress about which we boast, and on some of the ideas which were formerly accepted as axioms. People used to say that crime was almost all due to poverty, to ignorance, or to the absence of ideas ; but every man hitherto known to have shared in the attempts at murder by explosives has in a way been educated, has had com- mand of money not immediately needed for his dinner, and has been chock full of ideas, of the most perverted kind no doubt, but still ideas, and not mere animal instincts. The Anarchist assassin is, in fact, a special article, which has been evolved by some of the conditions of modern civilisation, and as it has grown, and has not been manufactured, we are by no means more sure than Sir Vivian Majendie that it will not in the end prove " formidable," not indeed to the fabric of society, which can only be injured by slow sapping, but to the happiness of the civilised world.
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