THE EXPLOSIONS IN LONDON.
THE only feeling that the explosions of Friday week can excite in sound English politicians is one of profound. melancholy. It is so hard with all our efforts never to advance. The deep irony in the fate of Ireland continues to haunt her course. As if it were not enough to be tied by a destiny which can never end, any more than the useless junc- tion of India with Asia can ever end, to the only people whom she can neither like nor understand, Ireland is cursed not only with the perversity of her inhabitants, but with the far deeper perversity of some among her descendants. The American-Irish, without wrongs, without burdens, who have fled from the sorrows of their land, are wrecking her chances. of happiness in unreasoning hatred of the partner whom she can never quit. If Ireland were independent to-morrow, her history would continue to be but a history of her relations to Great Britain ; and her children are carefully ensuring that this history should be a miserable one. There is something in the recent action of the Irish which makes one doubt whether there is such a thing as statesmanship,—whether nations are not the sport of something stronger than themselves, a Fate which is not divine ; whether, if governing men gave up effort and forewent sacrifice, and let the world drift as it would, the result would not be essentially the same. For fifteen years now the English have been steadily trying, so far as the imperfections of nature will permit, to do as the Irish wish ; the Irish admit that much has been done ; and the only result is that Irish hatred, which was cold, has become hot. The English have sacrificed every pre- judice dear to them about tenure, and property, and social organi- sation; and the result is that the Parnellites, their rancorous enemies, now thirty in number, will become seventy. Within the past three months the English have suppressed themselves to confer what they think, and the Irish think, are two benefits on Ireland. By majorities so large as to amount to practical unanimity, they have insisted, in the teeth of most bitter pre- judice and much reasonable argument, that the Irish shall share equally in the suffrage with themselves,—the Premier adding, though that is not yet conceded, that the Irish suffrage shall be rather more effective ; and, as the Irish wish for a peasant proprietary, the English have advanced twenty millions sterling to help them to their wish. The words were scarcely out of the Minister's mouth, the weekly papers had hardly printed the report of them, when agents, paid and selected by the Irish-Ameri- cans—or, at least, in Paris and New York they themselves say so—endeavoured, in the centre of London, to slaughter down the most innocent English they could find. It is folly to say the attack was on public buildings, and not on human
beings. The buildings were intended to come crashing down ; and if the Junior Carlton or Sir W. W. Wynn's house had so fallen, scores of lives would have been taken, against none of whom had the assailants any complaint, ex- cept that they were English and Irish gentlemen. There was absolutely no motive for the crime, except spite at the prosperous people who at last mean so kindly by the less fortunate race. The talk of " war " is nonsense. The Irish in war have been honourable as well as gallant men,—as in- capable of poisoning the wells or cutting down palm-trees as any race in Europe, or as the Arabs of the desert. Those who direct these attempts know as well as historians that such an attempt at coercing a people like the English is futile, that it has all been tried before, and has all ended in deepening the English decision never to give way. For nearly half a century, through the reigns of Elizabeth and James, the policy of terrorism was tried. England was incessantly worried, now by plots against the Queen's life, then by risings for Mary Stuart, again by a mighty invasion from Spain, and finally by a "dynamite plot," very nearly successful, to blow up King James and all the English statesmen at one stroke. The effort, pursued with deeper malignity and a stiffer tenacity than this one—for most of the plotters were English--resulted only in hardening the dogged English temper, till for three hundred years it has been impossible to obtain complete fair play for English Catholics. The outcome of Friday's outrages will be precisely the same,—a dull, cold anger, ending in a resolve that the party using such means is utterly, hopelessly bad ; one with which even compromise is not possible. If being, as the American Irish are, entirely without wrongs, absolutely free from oppression, they can act like this, concession, even if it were possible, would be useless. If Ireland were inde- pendent to-morrow, the hate and envy of English comfort, which is the first motive of the dynamite plots, would be as keen as ever, and Englishmen would be blown in pieces because England would not move out of the way of Irishmen's journeys to France. The men who send these criminals know that nothing is to be gained,—that if they destroyed London the only result, if any, would be an Irish massacre ; but they still persist. They have drunk of the water of illusion till they cannot see straight ; and, whatever the result to their countrymen, or to the future of the island they have quitted, they must gratify an all but delirious spite. The English shall suffer, be they as innocent as they may. And so, with the cheers of Englishmen at a great act of kindness to Ireland still unfinished, they are warned that among Irishmen are men who cannot be made reasonable, who receive benefits as insults, and can feel for those who would serve them only a murderous hate. Has it ever struck one of these men, we wonder, what kind of an idea of Irishmen ontrages-hke these breed in the world,—outrages directed not against monarchs or nations, but against the innocent ; outrages so little discrimi- nating that their victims would include scores of those for whom
the criminals profess a patriotic love? Just when the English put off to save the sinking ship, a section of the crew to be saved pour a volley into rescuers and rescued indiscriminately, and call upon the world to witness that they at least are faithful to the right.
What is to be done? There is nothing to be done except to endure with stolid patience, and as little hate as is possible, till it pleases God to strike, or till a new and strange form of crime, which will be short-lived, like other such forms has in its turn passed away. We must endure the dynamitarCls as Spanish Americans endure earthquakes, as part of the unfor- tunate order of things. There is no use in threats of reprisals which will never be carried out, and if they were, would only reduce Englishmen to the moral level of their assailants,—no use in further laws, no use in pausing in the effort to secure justice to the race which requites us thus. Ireland is not separate, a place borne up on Satan's sceptre and apart from the rest of the universe, that good in that one spot should not be stronger than evil. Let the good work go on, and let the police do what they can to discover and punish those who thus try to interrupt it. They can do very little. Men may be arrested, and suspicion may be strong ; but unless informers come forward, there is scarcely a possibility of evidence such as a fair-minded judge would accept. Who is to prove that a man seen walking rapidly at night down Piccadilly had just been flinging a bomb into the back area of a club, and endangering the lives of a dozen serving - women whom he had never seen ? There is the faint chance of treachery among the criminals, and the fainter one of remorse ; but the former has not been common when the trial is public, and the latter is unknown. The police have nothing to do except watch, and stop the supply of dynamite when they can. And we do not know that they can do even that to any great purpose. There are among us men cultivated beyond their fellows, and with a double account to render, who use their knowledge of the new powers of science to facilitate murder ; and against such men society is not armed. When men can carry death in handbags, and scatter destruction out of paper parcels, the only possible safeguard is the moral one,—the inability of human beings to bear the strain of an enthusiasm of crime for long. When conscience wakes up, as it must some day, and Irish leaders refuse to lead unless such " warriors " are made outcasts, and Irish followers regard them as they regard men who break the secret agrarian law, and Frenchmen and Americans refuse asylum to those who so abuse it, dynamite outrages will cease. Till then they will go on, as murder has always gone on through ages, in spite of all that Churches could teach or governments could threaten. A new and useless misery has been added to life, principally to the lives of the poor ; and that is all. The world seems, no doubt, to have gone back ; but, after all, the epidemic of dyna- mite is not worse, morally, than the epidemic of poison- ing, which has repeatedly broken out in Europe ; and pro- bably not so dangerous, for the poisoner, though as full of hate as the dynamitard, had the additional motive of per- sonal greed.
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