BLOODTHIRST.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1291, 26 November 1896, Page 10

BLOODTHIRST.

The passion of which the word " bloodthirst " is truly descriptive seems to be a kind of temporary mania excited in human beings by killing human beings, and in them only by that act. Animals are free of it. Even the preat felidie, with their ferocity developed by generations of hunger, never display it—never, for example, attack whole herds, for the pleasure of killing beasts which they cannot eat. There is a faint approach to it in the dog who " worries" a flock of sheep, but he does not kill on the spot, and seems at all events to be actuated not by lu3t of blood or even by the spirit of tyranny, but by an insane desire fora special dainty —the fat of the sheep's liver. The human being with the bloodthirst on him wants to kill after he has been killing. Soldiers, otherwise moat respectable, have acknowledged the feeling as rising in them after a hard fought day when many friends have fallen round them, and there are moments in battle when,, as the soldiers say, they "see red,", and in many armies, perhaps in all, i,t is difficult their oflicers to induce them to giye quarter. Killing relieyea. their burning thirst for vengeance. There are moments in almost evevy campaign, as all military historians know, when even highly disciplined soldiers seem to lose their reason, when their officers are powerless, and perfectly useless carnage cannot be stopped.. The existence of this passion, which no. experienced soldier doubts, is *«ie 'rue explanation of, the awful slaughter which occurred in, some anc;euta,nd some A<i*tic battles, and of, ghastly incident of warfare among savages, their almost constant habit of killing out the wounded. ]jt explains also the devilish excitement and thirst for move slaughter which, as the record of scenes like the St. Bartholomew murders or the murders recently committed in Constantinople proves, falls upon a crowd which has shed much blood. Many, perhaps a majority, do noc feel it, but the ferocious remainder appear to go, literally and medically mad, with an impulse which has in it that 0,1 tha murderer and of the hunter combined, and unlesa controlled by some form of terror they will go on killing while victims remain to be discovered. A separate passion of bloodshedding arises in them, :md tigers would be less cruel, the cruelty —it is one of the strangest o| the aroana <»f human nature -r-increasing with the absence of resistance. Jit might, indued, be possible to hold them partly irresponsible, but for the fact that they can instantly be reduced to order and sanity by appealing to their fears. A few soldiers, a volley, and the wildest mob, mad, literally mad to all appearance with the bloodthirsty will become on the instant reasonable, will take orders, will abandon, and in some instances even regret, its frightful excesses. A whiff of grape-shot would have calmed the French Terrorists at any moment, and a thousand of the Irish Constabulary with rifles would restore the worst mob of Constantinople to comparative sanity in ten minuses. It is because the English as a rule are so free of the bloodthirst that we dare be so lenient with our mobs, and because the rulers of foreign States know and dread the impulse that they are, as we think, so much too ready to resort to violent repression. A Southern mob, an Asiatic mob, or an African mob, which has once begun to kill cannoc be stopped except bv an appeal to fcerror. * grim i*rt whinh

those who believe inhuman nature, as we do not, will do well to ponder over. The wild beast latent in man becomes, as we are now seeing every week or so in Turkey, wilder, not tamer with release from external restraints. If the optimist philosophers were right all men would be humane, for nothing can be so convenient as humanity ; but as a fact there is nothing on earth so cruel as man if once he has broken loose from his fetters of custom, conscience, and social pressure, and has tasted blood. Till the first enemy falls a mob can be moved by reason or D y only to terror for its own life.— Spectator.