THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1901. THE ASSASSIN AGAIN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 38, 19 September 1901, Page 16

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1901. THE ASSASSIN AGAIN.

fHE Anarchist assassin has been at his red work again. This time the coward's aim has found its victim in Mr. McKinley, President of the United States, and for the third time in three years has struck a traitor's blow at the L principle of order in the State, shocked humanity, and plunged a nation into mourning. \T~ After the first news of the treacherous attack public hope in New Zealand flowed for a time, then ebbed ; and the gloom of the last sad messages from the scene of the awful crime was only relieved by the touching spirit of piety with which the dying statesman, standing on the verge of the future life, resigned his spirit into the hands of his Creator. ' God's will, not ours, be done,' said he to his disconsolate wife. And then, softly : • Nearer, my God, to Thee ' ; and, after a time, the parting words : 'Good-bye all ; good-bye. It is God's way. His will be done.'

Many a time and oft have rulers fallen beneath the assassin's hand in bygone centuries in Europe. But a new meaning has bten imported into political assassination since the time of Mazzini and especially since the evil day when Alexander 111. of Russia was blown to pieces by an Anarchist bomb in 1881, and the Anarchist-Socialist movement got a foot-hold among the nations of Europe. Formerly political ambition or rivalry or fear and the mere revolt against real or fancied tyranny were the motives for shortening the days of rulers. The process was effected (as in the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, Charles 1., and Louis XVI.) by a mock trial, but more frequently by the swifter method of knife, dagger, bullet, poison, or bomb. Nowadays rulers are more frequently done to death jnst because they are rulers. The past eight years have witnessed the assassination of no fewer than seven heads of States in Europe and America. Three of these— Nasr-ed-Din (Shah of Persia), General Borda (President of Uruguay), and Senor Barrios (President of Guatemala), were ' removed ' in accordance with what we may term the old principles — the chief apostle and apologist of which was Macchiavelli, in his work, II Principe (The Prince), which faced the light of publication in 1513. The remaining four— the Empress of Austria, King Humbert of Italy, President Carnot of France, and President McKinley of the United States — fell just because they were the embodiment of the principle of order, authority, and law in human society. Personal grudge no more urged the treacherous Czologo'sz to fire point-blank at the late Mr. McKinley than it led Bresci to ' draw a bead ' on King Humbert or the cowardly Luccheni to send his sharpened saw-file through the heart of the Empiess Elizabeth of Austria. Stab and shot were the official protest of anarchism against authority in the State. Your anarchist is essentially a puller-down. His policy is one of uncompromising destruction. For him, the present eocial system must go ; the principle of authority must be pulled up by the roots — or blown up with dynamite; the tall poppies must be lopped. And so the rulers fall.

Just after the murder of Mr. McKinley's predecessor, Mr. Abe Lincoln, in 1865, Mr. Disraeli, in the course of a notable speech in the House of Commons, coined fche well-known paying : ' Assassination has never changed the history of the world.' This is, in a real sense, true. An apt sign was secretly hung out in 1798 over Beresford's

Biding School — or, rather, School for Torture — in Dublin 4 Mangling done here ' It might have been painted all over Paris during the Commune in 1871, when Anarchism turued butcher. But the world sickened of its excesses and the * tally ' of assassination with which it sought to change the history of even one country o'ervaulted its purpose. Anarchism will never leaven humanity. But — till an effective and vigorous antidote be found and applied — it will knaw and blister it. In other words, the work of the cave and the dark conventicle, the work of dagger, torch, revolver, picrine bomb, and infernal machine, will probably go on for a time, for the underground legion is well organised and is developing its thews and sinews. Proudhon and his lieutenant, Bakunin, and Hamok and others have glozed over its crimes with fine phrases. Hamon's curious book, for instance — Physiologic de V Anarchiste-Socialiste, which was published in Paris in Itt96 — declares that the miscreants who shoot down an unarmed President at Buffalo or pierce a defenceless woman's heart at Geneva or blow up unoffending persons with dynamite bombs in a Barcelona theatre, are animated with a ' love of liberty,' ' tender-heartedness,' ' a sense of logic,' ' a feeling of justice,' and ' a love fot others ' ! A number of newspapers — many published on the Continent of Europe, at least one in London, and several in the United States — emphasise the same or similar ideas Screeching faoatics of boLh sexes echo them from barrelends or platforms, and trick out treachery and assassination in the gewgaws of fancy till, like the Thuggee of India, they become a fanatical cult. There lies less danger to rulers from the chosen and not over-willing emissary of the Anachist conventicle than from the sheer enthusiast and the neurotic youth who share in common the strange and morbid passion of the lowest order of criminals for so much of posthumous * fame ' as arises from ' doing a big thing ' and * dying game.'

It is a strange and lurid form of fanaticism. But certain Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have unwittingly done, perhaps, more to produce it than all the writings of Proudhon and Mazzini. England, Switzerland, France, and the United States, are, peihaps, the greatest offenders. One and all have given asylum and practical aid to the dark-lantern associations that plotted against neighboring States. Switzerland has long been the fertile mother of plots. Mazzini was welcome there until he started the ' Young Swiss ' conspiracy against his hosts. Then — in 1836 — he was, so to speak, led by the ear to the border and kicked across He openly belauded the regicide Hartmann, and laid down the principle that ' political assassination is the secret of successful revolutionary action.' His advocacy of the dagger as a political weapon did nob, however, prevent him being a welcome guest in London, where, to the knowledge of the Government of his day, he was up to the eye-brows in the revolutionary conspiracies of 1&52, 1853, and 1857. Orsini. the bomb-thrower, 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, and became a hero in Paris after having blown a number of unoffending persons into fragments in his attempt to ' remove ' the Emperor fv apoleon 111. in 1858. London was long the headquarters of the International — a chiefly foreign Anarchist association which ranked among its affiliated societies the Communards who turned Paris into a city of blood-stained and smoking ruins in 1871. Anarchist associations are openly at work in Chicago and other parts of the United States. The plot to murder King Humbert was hatched among them, and their fanatical approval of the assassination of the late President McKinley has been cabled even to these far-out ends of the earth.

Herein lies the scope of reform — in combined, simultaneous, energetic, and unceasing action to stamp out those criminal associations whose aim is to destroy that social order which it is the first function of a government to maintain. There was a ring of true vigor in what Bismarck said of those leagues of assassins : * Hunt them down like rats I ' British officials suppressed what Twain in his More Tramps Abroad terms the red terror, the desolating scourge, of olgl-established, secret, and organised bands, known as Thugs, who practised assassination on a large

scale in India. 'In 1830,' says Twain, ' the English found this cancerous organisation imbedded in the vitals of the Empire, doing its devastating work in secrecy, and assisted, protected, sheltered, and hidden by innumerable confederates — big and little native chiefs, customs officers, village officials, and native police, all read) to lie for it, and the mass of the people, through fear, persistently pretending to know nothing about its doings ; and this condition of things had existed for generations, and was formidable with the sanctions of age and old custom. If ever there was an unpromising task, if ever there was a hopeless task in the world, surely it was offered here — the task of conquering Thuggee. But that little handful of English officials in India set their sturdy and confident grip upon it and ripped it out, root and branch ! ' It took nineyears of persistent and enormously difficult work, but Lord William Bentinck and Captain Sleeman stamped it out at last. Some of the methods adopted against the Thugs of the East are applicable to their more degraded brethren of the West. One of these is Bismarck's plan, already alluded to — to ' hunt them down like rats,' to pursue them into their dark conventicles and leave them not a place whereon to rest the soles of their feet. But so long as the United States and European Powers allow their territories to be made the undisturbed and prolific breeding-grounds of suoh murderous associations, so long must we expect to hear again and yet again of foul deeds such as that which has just sent a shock of grief and dismay throughout the civilised world.