Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1885 — Dynamite. [ARTICLE]

Dynamite.

The indignation with which the dynamite crimes are regarded is very much greater than any terror which they produce. The means of criminal mischief were familiar long before the days of Guy Fawkes. Gunpowder and fire, the bullet and the steel, the bravo and the assassin, are all well known. But the ease with which a most destructive explosive can now be manufactured, and the secrecy with which it can be applied to its work, are so tempting to assassins that great catastrophes may be apprehended. But as they are merely wanton crimes, outraging humanity, and involving the lives and happiness of the most innocent persons, as, in fact, they are intended only to produce terror by indiscriminate destruction, they have but one effect—that of intense indignation and desire of vengeance. If every public building in London should be destroyed by Irish dynamite, the result would be, not Irish independence, but Irish extermination. Carlyle’s cynical suggestion that the true Irish policy would be to put the island under water for twenty-four hours would be the purpose of England. The atrocities of the French Revolution are explicable. They wele the mad outbreak of a misery and brutality which the Government had fostered, and for which it promised no relief. But this kind of explanation is wanting to the dynamite terrorists. Their conduct might have been extenuated as at least not surprising during the height of the abominable oppression of the penal laws. But for nearly a century there has been a constantly advancing relief of Irish suffering and correction of injustice in Ireland, until now there remains no abuse or inequality for which constitutional agitation is not the surest remedy. It is true, indeed, that the degradation and ignorance of a large part of Ireland are the logical result of English misconduct. George Mason truly said that Providence punishes national sins by national calamities. But. this cannot be pleaded in justification of the dynamite crimes. There is no people in the world that follow leadership more loyally than the Irish, and the Irish leaders, like Mr. Parnell and his associates, are neither ignorant nor degraded. Just so far as they yield to the brutality of their followers, they are guiltier than those followers, and the significant fact in the late crimes is not that'they were committed, but that Mr. Parnell, speaking in Ireland at the very moment when the whole civilized world protested, said not a single word. In protection against such attacks the cause of England is the cause of civilization. It is not a question of politics, or of a single national interest; it is that of orderly society against anarchy.- George William Curtis, in Harper’s Magazine.

Boston horse-cars won’t stop for you excepting at street corners, unless you happen to have a St. Louis girl with you. A St. Louis girl's- face will stop a horse-car anywhere. [P. B.—Chicago papers copying this paragraph will please remit at usual rates to this office.]—Somerville Journal.