EBOOK, THE DYNAMITER ***
Transcribed from the 1903 Longmans, Green And Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE DYNAMITER
TO MESSRS. COLE AND COX, POLICE OFFICERS
Gentlemen,--In the volume now in your hands, the authors have
touched upon that ugly devil of crime, with which it is your glory
to have contended. It were a waste of ink to do so in a serious
spirit. Let us dedicate our horror to acts of a more mingled
strain, where crime preserves some features of nobility, and where
reason and humanity can still relish the temptation. Horror, in
this case, is due to Mr. Parnell: he sits before posterity silent,
Mr. Forster's appeal echoing down the ages. Horror is due to
ourselves, in that we have so long coquetted with political crime;
not seriously weighing, not acutely following it from cause to
consequence; but with a generous, unfounded heat of sentiment, like
the schoolboy with the penny tale, applauding what was specious.
When it touched ourselves (truly in a vile shape), we proved false
to the imaginations; discovered, in a clap, that crime was no less
cruel and no less ugly under sounding names; and recoiled from our
false deities.
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