TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ACCIDENT AT MOSCOW.
THE awful accident at Moscow, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of those which in modern times have been caused by human agency, furnishes one more instance of that mysterious irony with which fate often appears to punish the confidence of men in their own achievements. It was because of the enormous multitudes whom the Czar had summoned to witness the display of his greatness, because of their enthusiastic loyalty, because on such an occasion State and throne and society had nothing to fear, that a multitude of men and women, reckoned on good evidence at three thousand six hundred, died in horrible agonies, the majority disembowelled, the remainder squeezed to death. It is the custom at a Corona- tion in Russia to associate the " black folk," the common people, with the festivity by giving to as many as attend a keepsake, a small iron goblet, enamelled inside and out, and a handkerchief with the portrait of the new Sovereign. The people are wild to obtain these things, not for their value, which is almost nothing, but because they will last for years or generations and remind them always of the Czar and his Imperial festival. With a fatuity, prompted, we should imagine, by a desire to afford the Czar a wonderful spectacle, those who organised the fete had arranged to give away the cups from a single range of booths, and, aware of the good temper and obedient ways of a Russian crowd, took no precaution beyond erecting barriers to divide the streams of humanity as they approached the booths. The common folk of Moscow, however, afraid lest they might be late for the distribution, assembled to the number of three hundred thousand at earliest dawn, they were reinforced by two hun- dred thousand at least from neighbouring villages, and by 8 o'clock they were sensible of unusual pressure, impatient with waiting, and fretful under the thirst and hunger entailed by a long May vigil amidst crowds. There was a movement among those near the booths to " hurry up " the distributors, the surrounding multitude followed, as it always does, and in a few moments more than thirty thousand tons of human flesh was in motion towards the booths. The barriers fell as if before the march of a glacier, the guardians of the cups grew frightened, as well they might, for the onward march would have crushed them as snails are crushed under a roller, they took to flinging out the cups in handfuls to be scrambled for, and in an instant the walking multitude became a multitude rushing, those in front eager for their treasures, those behind wild with fear lest they should be too late to obtain a share. The ground in front of the booths was a kind of shallow ravine ; the people as they arrived began to fall in ; the multitude, unable to stop or retreat, pressed on by irresistible weight from behind, kept surging forward, and of course all who were on the ground were trodden out of life. As the front ranks perceived the horror before them they of course tried to stop ; the back ranks, who must have been hundreds deep, unaware of what was occurring, still advanced, and shortly the crowd became a wedged mass, in which the short and the feeble and the women died in hundreds of asphyxia, drowned, in truth, by a pressure as fatal as that of water, and very like it in kind. One thing only could have saved them, an order in the Czar's name to sit down—the writer has heard such an order given in a similar scene, and witnessed its magical effect in stopping the rush— but no one thought of it, or possibly there was no elevated point from which the order could have been made audible, and the massacre must have continued many minutes. The police, who were unusually few, were either frightened or choked like the multitude, the Cossacks on the outskirts with their whips drove as many in as they drove out, and there were no bodies of trained soldiers, the Czar desiring, most naturally, that military force should be absent from the popular fete. The tragedy at last ended, but it was hours before the bodies could be all removed, or the injured, who were, we fancy, comparatively few, taken to the hospitals, and then—then all things rolled forward as if the tragedy had never occurred. The Czar and the Czarina, though deeply moved, and anxious even to passion to relieve the suffering so far as they could by large gifts of money, still presented themselves to the multitudes, the French Ambassador's grand entertainment went on, all the fêtes and gaieties continued, and it was noticed that the people welcomed their Sovereign as ardently as if nothing had occurred. There is something of the Asiatic in every Russian ; the multitude attributed the accident, as Asiatics would have done, to the will of God, and though they abused, and even threatened, the Chief of Police for not taking more effective care, they saw no reason why the Sovereign should be blamed, or why the festivities should be interrupted for a few deaths. We must all die, but we only share in a coronation once in a lifetime. The festivities too are half-religious, and we do not stop religious cere- monies because certain people have died. The conduct of the people and that of their rulers seems to Englishmen and Germans "stolid" or heartless, because they cannot accept any evil as inevitable, do not, in truth, at heart believe in accident at all ; but Russians and Asiatics can, and though we admire energy more, in their resigned fatalism there is an element at once of strength and of stability which Western Europe lacks.
It does not appear that any one was to blame, except for the fatuity of arranging that the enormous crowd expected should have only one objective, and even for that the blame cannot be very severe. The Russian officials, like the English officials, know their crowds when en file to be good tempered, obliging, and careful about children ; they expect them to manage for themselves, as our people do on Hampstead Heath or Epsom Downs, and their expectation is very rarely disappointed. Nothing could have saved the crowd in the Strand when the Princess Alexandra made her entry into London, as "bride of the heir of the Kings of the Sea," or during the reception of Garibaldi, if a stampede had once set in ; but the officials did not expect one ; they took no pre- cautions against one, and one did not occur. The Russian police authorities were a little stupid and bemused by use and wont ; that is all that can be fairly alleged against them, their " despotism" and their " immense powers " having absolutely nothing to do with the matter. They will doubtless next time, if they have not forgotten their lesson, distribute the cups at a hundred different points of the city, but even then, as all the people want to see the Czar and the Czar cannot divide himself, they may find themselves involved in a similar catastrophe. The truth is a mighty crowd is an imprisoned force like a reservoir; it may burst out, and if it does no human wisdom can avert some kind of a catastrophe. We think it can because we all unconsciously think of the indi- viduals composing the crowd as beings with energy and will, and forget that besides the individuals there is a crowd, that is an entity, without eyes or brains or will, a blind force which with a mere sway can throw down a wall or sweep away barriers that seem indestructible, or crush out a thousand lives. But that the dead and dying would break the shock as the existence of an earth- work would, the rush of a hundred thousand men would break down the giant palisades of the British Museum as certainly as the largest of round shot or a flood bursting from a reservoir like that of Holmfirth. The real wonder, when half a million of people are gathered together, is not that accidents occasionally occur, and are dreadful, but that they are so frequently escaped, that the gigantic crowd so seldom wedges itself, that the emotions of fear, anger, or desire which drive it together into a mass as the simoom drives sand are so infrequently evoked. Its safety is certainly not due to its intelligence or its self-restraint, for collectively it has neither, any more than a herd of animals or the sea, to which it has so often been compared. Once wedged and in motion, it will obey no leader, take no order, shrink from no danger, not even that from fire or flood, but will press on under a kind of possession which terminates sometimes as suddenly as it arose. We believe its safety, while it is safe, as it usually is, arises entirely from the reluctance of each individual to be wedged, the instinctive avoidance of the painfully close contact which destroys at once freedom and individuality. While that lasts the crowd is fluid; but the moment that is destroyed, be it by external circumstances or by emotion, the crowd becomes a thing, or rather an animal, and has as little power of self-protection as if it were inanimate. Its one chance then is a loud order of a kind which it can understand, like the peremptory com- mand " Attention, Right wheel, March," with which a coal Colonel, speaking from a. balcony, once saved a Berlin crowd from an imminent catastrophe.
We see that the remark, " What an ominous accident," is very widely repeated, and undoubtedly there are very few even of the cultivated who can keep that thought out of their mind; or who do not half-believe that the chance that this reign beginning so brightly may end in blood and disaster, as the Coronation ceremony has ended, has been by the accident in some way imperceptibly increased. The belief in itself must be utter folly. There is no particle of evidence that Kings or nations or individuals are ever warned in this way of a future which in all other ways is so rigidly concealed from them, while the injustice of inflicting a calamity on the innocent, as a warning to the possibly guilty of that which, nevertheless, cannot be averted, is too palpable for discussion. Still, the belief in omens is nearly universal among the ignorant, and if the Russians took this accident to be one, it might have impor- tant political effects. Far and wide as the news flies the Russians would be impressed with the notion that this reign will be unlucky, and probably nothing could so sap the personal authority, and even the popularity, of the occupant of the throne. We doubt, however, whether the accident will be considered an omen, whether the Russians connect it with the Czar or his destiny at all, whether their view of it will not in fact precisely resemble their view of a famine, a flood, or an epidemic, that it has been ordered by a Will which it is useless to discuss and impious to challenge or abuse. It is very difficult for Western observers to discern accurately in what the religiousness of Russian peasants consists, but that they are religious in a way is the testimony of all observers, and the accident, by reason of its very greatness and awfulness, will appeal to this side of them, and be regarded as too serious for an omen. Had the Czar stumbled as he entered the Cathedral of the Assumption, or dropped his crown as he lifted it on his head, or fainted during the endless tedium of the Coronation ceremonial, that would have been an omen indeed, but this will be accepted as only a sad event.
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