The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1898. THE ASSASSINATION OF THE EMPRESS OF AUSTRIA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 19, 15 September 1898, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1898. THE ASSASSINATION OF THE EMPRESS OF AUSTRIA.

MOTHER crowned head has fallen by the assassin's hand. This time the victim is a woman — the Empresss Elisabeth of Austria. Particulars of the foul deed of blood appear elsewhere in our columns of this date. It has added another — and perhaps the sharpest — y - thorn to the crown of sorrow that circles the head of the Chief of the House of Habsburg, and it intensifies the sense of insecurity which has given to both the crowned and uncrowned heads of States the feeling of hunted animals] ever since the evil day when Alexander 111. of Russia was blown to pieces by a Nihilist bomb in 1881, and the Anarchist-Socialist movement took a hold among the nations of Europe. This movement inaugurated a new phase of regicide. Few centuries have passed without witnessing the doing to death of some or other ruler, whether by real or pretended process of law, as in the cases of Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, or by the swifter method of dagger, knife, bullet, or poison. The motive which usually led to such assassinations were those personal or party interests and passions which will ever toss the surface of political life, despite Constitutions and popular Governments, till society reaches an ideally perfect state and the millennium is among us. Lincoln was a victim to political passion. Garfield was shot by a disappointed office-seeker. But these acts were aimed at the occupant of the office, not at the office itself. Both victim and assassin held by the eternal and unshaken principle of authority in the State. They agreed in the broad principles of right Government. Where the murderer was not carried away by the impetus of personal interests, fears, jealousies, or animosities, he differed with his victim merely on the local utility or applicability of this or that minor point of politics or statesmanship. « * #

The nineteenth century has introduced a fresh and farreaching motive for political assassination — a motive that lies much deeper than mere personal passion or party or political feeling. Lucciieni and his party had no more personal grudge against the Empress Elisabeth than Obeiuunk had agamst her husband, whom he endeavoured to assassinate at Trieste in 1882. It was sufficient for Luccheni and his fellow-conspirators that she stood for the principle of authority in the State. Luccheni's stab was the Anarchist's protest against authority. In politics, as in religion, the maddest theorists will ever find a following. Johanna Soutrcotic furnishes an instance of the latter ; Proudhox of the former. He is the acknowledged father of revolutionary Socialism. Oberdank and Luccheni are merely his disciples. As he taught that ' property is theft,' so also did he preach that all authority is oppression ; that all government of man by man is tyranny ; that the only true form of society is that state of anarchy wherein each man is a law to himself. The Russian Bakunin took up and spread his theories. Their flower and fruit were witnessed in the horrors of the Paris Commune of 1871. The Anarchist-Socialist is essentially a puller-down. His policy is one of uncompromising destruction. The present social system must go. The principle of authority must be pulled up by the roots. The tall poppies must be lopped. And so the rulers fall.

Anarchist - Socialism has its recognised literature. Proubhon is its Mahomet ; Bakunin his lieutenant. Prince Krapotkine, Elisee Reclus, and Hamon hold its banner aloft to-day. They cover the grinning skeleton with a decent drapery of fine phrases. Such concealments

are a tribute to public sentiment, which is still happily to a vast extent Christian. Were we to believe Hamon's Psychologic de V Anarchiste-Socialiste (Paris : 1896), the Anarchists who throw bombshells in St. Petersburg and picrine explosives in Barcelona, and pierce a woman's heart at Geneva, are animated with ' love of liberty,' * tenderheartedness,' '.a sense of logic,' 'a feeling of justice,' 'a thirst for knowledge,' and ' love for others ' ! But, disguise it as you will, Proudhonism is a revolt against government, against all authority, human or divine. The great religious revolution of the sixteenth century was a revolt against all authority in the Church. Anarchism is individualism in a State without a Church. The other is individualism in the deeper subject of religion, but collectivism in the lighter side of human understanding, that of politics. For reasons already stated by us in a recent series of articles, the principle of individualism in religion has not had a chance of producing the full measure of its logical results. For one analagous reason the spirit of individualism in politics has never reached, nor is it likely ever to reach, its logical terminus. Society is, consciously or unconsciously, running along the lines of ideals that are purely Christian. Even were the light of Christian faith to set in social life — we here suppose what we know by faith cm never be — there would longremain a warm afterglow of Christian feeling which would, as far as it went, prove an unsuitable medium for the cultivation of revolutionary Anarchism. In times and places of great disturbance or upheaval it may float and froth for a time on the surface of things, as it did in Paris in 1871. The world sickened of its excesses then. It can never exist on a large scale, for it is self-destructive. Its work will ever be that of the cave and dark conventicle— of dagger, torch, and bomb and infernal machine. In all human probability it will cause again and yet again and again public anger and grief and horror. It may gnaw and blister humanity. It will never leaven it.

Partly by apathy, partly by connivance, partly by direct encouragement, certain Governments of Europe have raised the wind that has grown into a whirlwind. England, Switzerland, France, and Piedmont have been the chief sinners in this respect. They gave an asylum, and sometimes practical aid, to dark-lantern associations that plotted against neighbouring States, and wich v sweet inconsistency hanged or guillotined conspirators against their own authority. Switzerland has long been the hatching-ground of many a plot. Mazzini was welcome there till he started his ' Young Swiss ' conspiracy against his hosts. Then he was expelled in 1836. He openly praised the regicide Hartmann, and stated that ' political assassination is the secret of successful revolutionary action.' His well-known principles did not, however, prevent him being a welcome guest in London, where, to the knowledge of the Governments of his day, he was concerned in the revolutionary conspiracies of 1852, 1853, and 1857. Orsini found many sympathisers in London after his escape from Hungary, where sentence of death had been recorded against him. He was a personal friend and confidant of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel. In Paris he became a hero after he had attempted to murder the Emperor and Empress in 1858 and blown a number of unoffending people into fragments. Even Jules Favre pleaded not for the life but for the 'honour' of his sanguinary client. London was long the headquarters of the International — a chiefly foreign Anarchist association which ranked among its affiliated societies the Communists, who made Paris a city of blood-stained and smoking ruins in 1871. It is a dreary tale, that runs on from 1830 to the present hour. Herein lies the scope of reform — in combined, simultaneous, energetic, and unceasing action by the Governments to stamp out those criminal associations whose purpose it is to destroy that social order which it is the first function of a Government to maiutajn. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But here the cure must first come. It should carry with it its due measure of prevention. There is a ring of true vigour in Bismarck's plan of dealing with the Anarchist Socialists : ' Hunt them down like rats' — pursue them into their dark conventicles and leave them not a place whereon to rest the soles of their feet. The Swiss Government may flood Vienna with messages of sympathy, but so long as they, or other European Powers, knowingly allow their territory to be made the undisturbed and prolific

breeding-grounds of such murderous associations, so long will political assassination be rampant, and so long may-we expect any morning to hear again and yet again of such foal deeds of blood as have now tricked out a nation In Ti^he weeds of woe. ' i