THE AMERICAN CHARLOTTE CORDAY.
IT is, we suppose, only natural that many Englishmen and Americans should rejoice because someone has attempted to kill O'Donovan Rossa. The air of the world would have seemed so much purer without him. The man, if he really played the part attributed to him by English imaginations, was so utterly bad, and appeared to be so completely beyond the reach of human justice, that killing him seemed to the unthinking a new and acceptable kind of tyrannicide. According to his own account, given to his would-be slayer, he ordered all the recent explosions in England, and openly expressed his indifference whether in those explosions women and children were slaughtered or not ; and intended, if only his subscriptions came in freely enough, to continue in that course. He would remain in America, and scatter death in England. In other words, he was a man who killed the innocent without scruple and without remorse, in furtherance of an idea for which he did not care enough to risk his own life. It is possible, of course, that O'Donovan Rossa was only boasting in order to extract dollars ; but boasting of that sort reveals a nature almost as evil as that of the criminal he professed to be, and rather baser ; and it is impossible to be surprised that the civilised world does not feel inclined to shed tears over his sufferings. But the sentiment of sympathy with such an acts though natural, springs from that part of our nature which it is a duty to suppress ; and we are sorry to see how completely the instinctive horror felt for the victim has prevented any feeling of horror for the assassin. "Mrs. Dudley" may be an " intellectual-looking " and highspirited woman, as she is described, and may have acted from motives as pure as those which guided the knife of Charlotte Corday ; but she murdered, or tried to murder, O'Donovan Rossa nevertheless, and her act was morally inexcusable. The motive was not base, but the deed was murder. She appears to be an educated woman who has had a strange career, and is liable to fits of depression and exaltation scarcely to be distinguished from insanity. She had, indeed, been confined in an asylum for a year, and had once attempted her own life, and belonged altogether to that class of semi-lunatics who obey what they themselves describe as irresistible impulses. In New York she made her living as a nurse to the sick, earning a good repute in that capacity ; and her sanity seems demonstrated by the careful pains she took to ascertain the truth about O'Donovan Rossa from his own lips. She, however, believed him beforehand to be the head of the Irish dynamiters ; she read his paper constantly, with its fiendish threats of blowing-up or burning-down London ; and she gradually came to consider him, as Mdlle. Corday considered Marat, as the incarnation of all that was hostile to her God, her people, and the right. Therefore she shot him with a revolver. That is the usual history of murderers from fanaticism ; and if such a deed is to be excused, we do not see how any regicide is to be condemned, or, indeed, any other assassin who honestly believes that his victim is too bad and too dangerous to live. O'Donovan Rossa could not plead that excuse, because he does not kill those whom he deems guilty, but those whom he admits to be innocent; but many an Irish assassin could,—perhaps even Carey, when he organised the murder of poor Mr. Burke. Mr. Burke's patent innocence in the eyes of the majority has little to do with the matter; for if we admit the excuse at all, we must accept the murderer as, for the purpose in hand, the final judge of the victim's conduct, and must allow the absurdity that an assassin may be guilty or blameless, according to his skill in reading character or history. The truth is, the excuse is worthless. No one has the right to take the divine prerogative into his own hand, and decide that it is time for such and such a man, unheard, and untried, and uncondemned, to cease to cumber earth. The law against murder implanted in the conscience, and only registered by human law, is absolute; and the character of the victim makes only this difference, that it may diminish or increase the wickedness of the motive. Mrs. Dudley is not an evil murderess, but she is a murderess none the less ; and in allowing ourselves to condone her offence, and still more in allowing ourselves to exult in it, we are committing the precise sin of those who sympathise with dynamitards. They also say that the murderers they applaud are disinterested and patriotic, and goaded on to doing wild justice by intolerable provocation ; and who, save God, shall say that they are always insincere ? That O'Donovan Rossa deserved punishment, and this not only at English hands, but at the hands of any civilised people among whom he dwelt, may be fully admitted; but he was as much entitled to be tried and heard in his own defence as any other criminal, and to decide otherwise is to sanction the very principle of the vendetta. The Corsican who devotes himself on that theory to avenge a murder is not guilty, and the man who helps to lynch a murderer caught red-handed is absolutely innocent. The law is, "Thou shall not murder," not "Thou shall not murder the good."
But we shall-be told this theory leaves a man like O'Donovan Rossa, who was sheltered by a State too powerful to be attacked, or any evil master of a large army, beyond the reach of punishment, at liberty, in fact, to go on committing crimes in luxurious impunity. That is perfectly true ; and we can understand how, in our modern world, that reflection to many minds has become intolerably painful, or indeed unbearable. We have become so accustomed to remedies for wrong, that the existence of a wrong which cannot be remedied, and especially of a frequentlyrecurring wrong, seems positively unnatural—inconsistent with ultimate laws, and, as it were, involving disgrace to mankind which ought to provide a remedy. We can conceive a man full of love for justice getting that idea into his head until he loathes himself because he does not himself go and secure the punishment of the wrongdoer with his own hand. Sympathy is strong now; and at the same time with the sympathy there has grown-up a disbelief in the willingness of Heaven to right all things in time, a distrust in the old belief which enabled men to bear patiently oppression far worse than any which is now allowed to exist. There may, say many in their hearts or openly, be no future state; and then the wrongdoer, if we do not interfere, will triumph altogether, may, even like O'Donovan Rossa, scatter death from a distance, and yet pass through life unassailed, and in possession of all the comfort he desires. It is inconceivable, they argue, that such a result can be compatible with any true law of right. We recognise, we say, fully how bitter in our day that train of reasoning may be, how strong an incentive to what may be called heroic crime; but the answer to the conclusion it suggests is clear. The decay of our fortitude—for that is what the plea amounts to— is no argument for the breach of law, whether the law comes from outside or from within ourselves. We have no more right to cure the incurable by crime than to cure the curable. If the worst comes to the worst, and effort is clearly vain—as the effort to cure some wrongs is clearly vain, as, for example, the effort of an English Abolitionist to put down slavery in Alabama would, in 1859, have been clearly vain—our business is to bear, trusting, if we are fortunate enough to believe in Him, in God for remedy, and if not, then still to bear, and seek compensation for the world in ourselves becoming the gentler for our sympathy with the oppressed. There are miseries as incurable and as unavoidable as death,—miseries, many of them, like congenital blindness, or idiotcy, or moral-perversity, which seem to impugn the very justice of God, or to destroy our right to believe in the beneficent operation of natural laws, yet which have to be borne ; and so must some evils in the political and moral world. There is a stoicism which is the very foundation of virtue, in the sense that virtue can hardly exist without it, —the stoicism which binds us to respect the obligations obligatory on ourselves though the world fall in ruins round us; and we grieve to see it growing gradually weaker, even though the weakness arises from the development of a virtue. Suppose the dynamitards are able to destroy London, and intent on doing it, will that justify our killing-out in advance all whom we suspect or know to believe in the gospel of dynamite, or, if we cannot detect them, all who speak with an Irish brogue P We say," No ;" but if we may judge from a good many comments we hear, there are a good many who would say " Yes ;" and declare that unless they said "Yes," they would allow evil to be triumphant. It must be triumphant sometimes, and for a short time, even' as Terror has been triumphant often. It is not within our right to commit murders in order that murders may be fewer ; and neither was it within that of Mrs. Dudley, who will probably find that the only result of her offence has been to give a few assassins the excuse of vengeance for their assassinations. Her friends will plead the vengeance of right on wrong ; but how do they know what destiny for O'Donovan Rossa her bullet might have prevented ? He might have died of horror at himself. Her education and character, and O'Donovan's criminality, are but reasons the more for remembering the command which the modern world, its the very quickness and poignancy of its sympathies, is daily more in danger of forgetting,:--" Tarry thou the Lord's leisure."
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