THE SECRET MOTIVE OF SECRET SOCIETIES.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1100, 25 May 1883, Page 4

THE SECRET MOTIVE OF SECRET SOCIETIES.

The motives which impel ordinary men, and especially ordinary men without personal wrongs to avenge, to enter .secret societies embodied with an intention to kill are doubtless many and many diverse ; but, says the Spectator, we take it, the dominant one in all is the'desire for power. In a time and place of secret societies a strong-willed man, full of desire to be somebody, io be efficient, to exercise real and direct power, knows that if he enters such a society and rises high, his ambition will speedily be Gratified to the fullest extent. With little money no hj rth, and no ascendancy abroad, he may within and through the society exercise a power which, to him who wields it, must seem t> omendous. for transcending the power of any minister or anv general.. The power, it must be remembered, is necessarily far greater in his eves than in those of any outsider. The world knows only his acts, but he knows also his designs, and in their easy prospect of realisation they appear to him like acta. He feels, in not killing, as if he had spared. The world sees that a man, possibly a great man, has fallen; but, the man who made him fall feels as if anybody might fall at his signal, as if he were distributing death and life, were an arbiter of destiny, a potentate secretly wielding the lightning at his will. He feels almost like a deity. That was, it is known, the feeling of Thomassen, the “ monster” of Bermerhaven, who delighted in dining with passengers about to sail in ships which be had doomed by his clockwork apparatus to nink in mid ocean; and that is the attraction which, as all their confessions attest, has always carried away successful prisoners. They feel the sense of power in its most concentrated and ecstatic form, power over the issues of life and death, the power which, to whomsoever it belongs, be lie Cresar, or Sultan, or criminal, separates him utterly from bis kind. The leading spirit of a secret society enjoys that, and in a higher degree than the prisoner, for he can act by others, and even at a distance, and his volition does not therefore seem to himself impeded and weakened in its thunderbolt character by the small trickeries and precautions and petty efforts essential to the prisoner’s success. He wills like a despot, and the victim falls. Jhat is the luxury of the. position, and we can easily conceive that to men with a strong thirst for power —and that thirst is in some men the most intense in all craving—with steady nerves and indurated hearts, that fascination may be 'nearly irresistable, more especially as there is added to it another, the fascination so Sovereign with a large section of mankind—with one-half, for example, of all English gentlemen—the fascination of bun ting game which may turn and rend them. All the evidence given at Kilmamham suggests that when assassins were hunting Mr Forster or Mr Burke the dominant sense among them was that of being engaged in a battle of very large and very dangerous game. Carey in particular throughout his narrative tells of his arranging signals and giving signals, and marking distances and retiring to safe points of observation, exactly as ho would have told of some grand tiger-hunt in which he was so interested that no detail escaped him, yet in which it was expedient that the actual conflict should be left to stronger hands. Mr Bosworl.h Smith, in Ids new “ Life of Lord Lawrence,” tells us how a petty prince ordered an encmv to be killed, and sent with the murderer a runner to give aid or to report. The man, utterly faithful to the prince, saw the deed done, and ran 90 miles continuously to his master to report success, was received with delight, and dismissed and then—and then stooped down io raise the carpet j portiere of his master’s chamber, certain that be sboubl hear the order of his own assassination. It came as he expected, and he fled on faster than the prince’s horsemen to his own home in the mountain to relate the story to John Lawrence, That prince was but Carey in another clime, and his order as to his runner would create in his principality as little surprise as it did in the runner himself, who yet flew on to the betrayal he knew to be so nearly certain. Why, under such circumstances, confidence exists at all, why the runner serves the prince, why, in an Irish secret society, anyone trusts anyone eke, is only to be explained by the belief each man entertains that the catastrophe will not happen to him ; that he will be successful; and that, being succesiul, faith will be kept But the conscience 1 T he conscience of the despot '•'ho is often inflicting unjust penalties does not seem to wake while he is inflicting them, nor does that of brigands. Jf there is one thing certain in the history of crime, it is that habitual murder acts like some powerful drug as a soupefier to the conscience. The great poisoners have seldom betrayed a trace of it, or the great pirates, or the great brigands. That it can wake, even in such men, we firmly believe; but it is slow to waken. The Thugs, who seem, while their career lasts, absolutely without it, do, we believe, after years of their quiet, industrious seclusion—they all make tents for the array—show most distinct traces of it, traces so deep that their experienced watchers will not

allow visitors to allmle to their dimes, but it wakes more slowly than in any ■class of criminals It impels them to confession, to an abstinence from small crimes—a striking peculiarity of the Thugs, as of many of the worst French Terrorists—but not till the stupefaction has passed away to personal remorse. We can offer no explanation of the phenomenon, except tire very obvious one that no. man in .whom conscience was vigorous would join such a society, or the possible hypothesis that to such a man a human being does actually become, as it were, game; but of the fact there can be no question and its existence is one more justification of the horror with which mankind regards such associations. We all know the tremendous effect of opinion upon conscience, frequently almost stupefying it permanently ; and such associations, it would seem cer tain, generate within themselves an opinion under which the sense of criminality in murder disappears—an opinion, doubtless, helped by (he internal law dooming every recalcitrant to .'death, and so producing the feeling that crime is not crime, but only obedience to irresistible necessity. Carey, as yet, is only anxious to defend himself from the charge of being “an informer." years hence, the pressure on his conscience will be other than that; but till then, there is in all who take up assassination as •a work a blood drunkenness.