MR. DISRAELI ON SECRET SOCIETIES.
WE wonder whether Mr. Disraeli really believes in "Secret Societies" as effective political forces, or whether, like Dumas, Bulwer, Henry Kingsley, and Wilkie
Coffins, he merely uses them as convenient because quasi- supernatural literary machinery. To judge by his words, he
has somewhere in his mind a relic of belief in their power, but
then his words tell us little of Mr. Disraeli's thought. His heroine in " Lothair," Theodora, the Roman lady who hoped
to free Italy with money wrung from negro slaves, talks of
one such society, "the Mary Anne," as if it were a real power, though neither she nor it can move a step without a loan,—in "Tancred," Mr. Disraeli, not yet converted to a belief in the omnipotence of cash, laughs at the Syrian Prince who is to conquer Asia provided he gets a loan ; —and Captain Bruges (General Kmety ?) speaks of another, the Madre Natura, with a kind of disgusted awe. It is so powerful that it can not only impose terms on the Emperor of the French, which is possible to any society unscrupulous enough to menace individual life, but can guarantee his dynasty. The Mary Anne, if we remember the
stories of 1848 aright, was a Trades' Union formed originally among the French bargees, and the Madre Natura a secret association of sceptics ; but Mr. Disraeli is much more likely to know the unknowable than we are. Collectively, Mr. Disraeli describes these societies as the bones of the party known as "the Revolution," which, again, forms a sort of cor- poration as powerful, as widely spread, and as unscrupulous as he represents the Roman hierarchy to be. A belief in the existence and the power of these occult associations is very general on the Continent, particularly among policemen, and just after the Orsini attempt, became an article of faith in England ; and though it has of late been dying out, we should not wonder if " Lothair " did something towards its revivification. People like to believe in the quasi-super- natural, and the existence of occult associations permeating all lands, swaying minds of all degrees, and wielding hundreds of daggers and thousands of rifles, leaves a quasi-supernatural impression of mingled mystery and terror and beneficence. An immense number of persons will believe almost any story of the Russian police, which is foiled every day ; or of the Company of Jesus, which gets expelled from some country or other about once in every twenty years, and which an ex-Jesuit tells us is as a corporation timid to weakness; or of the associations supposed, often without the least proof, to be guided by Mazzini, and which have not yet upset even a monarchy so shaky as that of Italy ; or of the International Workmen's League, of which employers everywhere seem inclined to make such a bogey, but which as yet seems little more than a resolute Trades' Union ; and they will be equally ready to believe in Mary Anne, Madre Natura, or any other society which Mr. Disraeli may invest with superhuman attributes.
They will believe the more readily, because their error, like Mr. Disraeli's, is not in believing in the existence of Secret Societies, but in exaggerating their attributes. That a great party, linked by strong intellectual sympathies in every country of Europe does exist, and is so hostile to monarchy, privilege, and priestly pretension, that it will risk Revolution to overthrow them, is undoubtedly true, and is one of the gravest of political facts ; and that this party may conceal in its midst certain associations with vague or clear objects— such as the expulsion of the Papacy from Rome—and very strict rules, is also true ; but that does not prove that secret societies are or can be very powerful. They have but one weapon, terrorism, and they have incredible difficulty in using that. Modern society is so organized that no associa- tion limited enough to include none but fanatics, who can and will keep secrets, could contend successfully even with a weak government, much less with a government supported by the acquiescence of its people. It could not collect money enough, arms enough, men enough, to fight a single cam- paign, or gain control of a single state like Geneva or Servia, or a single island like Sardinia or Sicily. If it could, it would be strong enough to act openly, and the advan- tages of that mode of warfare are so obvious that it would be sure to do it. Even in Russia, and Italy, and Ireland, where circumstances have made such societies more powerful than in other portions of Europe, they have never achieved a real success, never effected a great political change, never seriously modified the coarse of affairs, which flows on in spite of their real or supposed plotting& To do that, they must secure the control either of votes, or rifles, or opinion ;
and to secure either they must act openly, for avowed objects, and objects with which great numbers of persons can be found to sympathize. Of course, if they employ terror, they may achieve a temporary success. The world is governed to a certain extent by individuals, and a society which can threaten such individuals with death, or even with annoy- ance, may secure a temporary influence, or order a specific reform, but it is wonderful how seldom such threats have turned the course of affairs. The number of " tyrants " who have been put to death in all history is wonderfully small. Kings and Premiers are hard to kill, and still harder to frighten. They can and do defend themselves against vulgar attempts to murder, and assassin fanatics are rarer than the world is apt to believe. The successful assassin is the man who cares nothing about his life if only his cause may prosper, and that kind of man is just the man who recoils from murder, even though he may be ready to extenuate its perpetration. Political hatreds have been very bitter in our time, but only one such attempt has succeeded, and that was aided by the strange, almost unexampled, circumstance that the intended victim desired in his heart to carry out the very policy for not carry- ing out which he was threatened ; and that was not the more successful because arranged, if it was arranged, by a secret society. Any Italian possessed of Orsini's daring, patriotism, unselfishness, and unscrupulousness—a combination almost without precedent—might have attempted the same deed with the same result. No group of persons like Orsini is possible, no group able and willing, by means like his, to exercise a coercive influence over all Kings and Premiers ; and if it could exist, it would be faced and sup- pressed amidst the execration of mankind, which instinctively feels that every assassination of a ruler involves, first of all, a treachery, and next, a tyrannous imposition upon the people, which has not hated the ruler enough to rise against him. Felice Orsini's act, supposing him to have intended death and not terror, involved the arrogation of a right to veto finally the French choice of a ruler, an act as much opposed to political morals as a similar veto by a foreign power would have been. Unless we are greatly mistaken, the reluctance to use the dagger as a political agent deepens, and with it all prospect of an increase in the power of secret societies. The exemption of Garibaldi from such attempts, in spite of the hatred borne towards him by the Parti Pretre and Absolutists everywhere, a hatred quite as bitter as that of Reds for despots, shows progress ; and so does the bizarre little incident lately reported from Paris, the condemnation of the Emperor to penal servitude by a public meeting. They meant to aggravate insult by an affected limitation of vengeance, but in 1798 the same suggestion was received by the multitude of Paris as a clear proof of treachery.
What with the decay, not of individual despotism, but of individual oppression, the softened tone of politics, the spread of the Press, and the rise everywhere of governing assemblies which cannot be terrorized, the day of Secret Societies, which was never a bright one, is, we suspect, passing away ; and as the day of insurrection is gone by too—for after all, if the army is faithful, insurrection against breech-loaders is folly, and if it is not faithful, is a wanton waste of life—there is room for curious speculation whether mankind will succeed in discovering a new method of political resistance. We can conceive cases in which a minority would be just as bitter against a majority as subjects have ever been against rulers. That might happen, for instance, on many religious questions, and we are very curious to see what form the inevitable resistance will assume. Insurrection is hopeless, assassination impossible ; what will the minority do ? Will they submerge themselves like Mr. Disraeli's friends, the Spanish Jews, who were excel- lent Christians in Aragon, and "pure Sephardim" again when out of harm's way,—there are submerged sects in Russia, and all Asiatic countries ; or will they fly, as the Puritans did in the sixteenth century, and the Mormons of Illinois did in this, to a world of their own? or will they devise some new and effective form of passive resistance, such as is now being tried in our midst by the Peculiar People, and such as at last emancipated the Quakers
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