Forces on the freer hour." [(9)]
No one perhaps is better qualified than Lombroso to speak on the present punitive methods of society as a direct cause of terrorism. "Punishment," he says, "far from being a palliative to the fanaticism and the nervous diseases of others, exalts them, on the contrary, by exciting their altruistic aberration and their thirst for martyrdom. In order to heal these anarchist wounds there is, according to some statesmen, nothing but hanging on the gallows and prison. For my part, I consider it just indeed to take energetic measures against the anarchists. However, it is not necessary to go so far as to take measures which are merely the result of momentary reactions, measures which thus become as impulsive as the causes which have produced them and in their turn a source of new violence.
"For example, I am not an unconditional adversary of capital punishment, at least when it is a question of the criminal born, whose existence is a constant danger to worthy people. Consequently, I should not have hesitated to condemn Pini[K] and Ravachol. On the other hand, I believe that capital punishment or severe or merely ignominious penalties are not suited to the crimes and the offenses of the anarchists in general. First, many of them are mentally deranged, and for these it is the asylum, and not death or the gallows, that is fitting. It is necessary also to take account, in the case of some of these criminals, of their noble altruism which renders them worthy of certain regard. Many of these people are souls that have gone astray and are hysterical, like Vaillant and Henry, who, had they been engaged in some other cause, far from being a danger, would have been able to be of use in this society which they wished to destroy....
"As to indirect suicides, is it not to encourage them and to make them attain the end that they desire when we inflict on all those so disposed a spectacular death?... For many criminals by passion, unbalanced by an inadequate education, and whose feeling is aroused by either their own misery or at the sight of the misery of others, we would no more award the death penalty if the motive has been exclusively political, because they are much less dangerous than the criminal born. On the other hand, commitment to the asylum of the epileptic and the hysteric would be a practical measure, especially in France, where ridicule kills them. Martyrs are venerated and fools are derided." [(10)]
Of course, Lombroso is endeavoring to prescribe a method of treatment for the terrorist that will not breed more terrorists. He sees in the present punitive methods an active cause of violence. However, it is perhaps impossible to hope that society will adopt any different attitude than that which it has taken in the past toward these unbalanced souls. In fact, it seems that a savage lex talionis is wholly satisfying to the feudists on both sides. Neither the one nor the other seeks to understand the forces driving them both. They are bent on destroying each other, and they will probably continue in that struggle for a long time to come. However, if we learn little from those actually engaged in the conflict, there are those outside who have labored earnestly to understand and explain the causes of terrorism. Ethics, religion, psychology, criminal pathology, sociology, economics, jurisprudence—all contribute to the explanation. And, while it is not possible to go into the entire matter as exhaustively as one could wish, there are several points which seem to make clear the cause of this almost individual struggle between the anarchists above and the anarchists below.
Some of those who have written of the causes of terrorism have a partisan bias. There are those among the Catholic clergy, for instance, who have sought to place the entire onus on the doctrines of modern socialism. This has, in turn, led August Bebel to point out that the teachings of certain famous men in the Church have condoned assassination. He reminds us of Mariana, the Jesuit, who taught under what circumstances each individual has a right to take the life of a tyrant. His work, De Rege et Rege Constitutione, was famous in its time. Lombroso tells us that "the Jesuits ... who even to-day sustain the divine right of kings, when the kings themselves believe in it no longer, revolted at one time against the princes who were not willing to follow them in their misonéique and retrograde fanaticism and hurled themselves into regicide. Thus three Jesuits were executed in England in 1551 for complicity in a conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth, and two others in 1605 in connection with the powder plot. In France, Père Guignard was beheaded for high treason against Henry IV. (1595). Some Jesuits were beheaded in Holland for the conspiracies against Maurice de Nassau (1598); and, later in Portugal, after the attempt to assassinate King Joseph (1757), three of the Jesuits were implicated; and in Spain (1766) still others were condemned for their conspiracy against Ferdinand IV.
"During the same period two Jesuits were hanged in Paris as accomplices in the attempt against Louis XV. When they did not take an active part in political crimes, they exercised indirectly their influence by means of a whole series of works approving regicide or tyrannicide, as they were pleased to distinguish it in their books. Mariana, in his book, De Rege et Rege Constitutione, praises Clément and apologizes for regicide; and that, in spite of the fact that the Council of Constance had condemned the maxim according to which it was permitted to kill a tyrant."[L] [(11)]
That the views of Mariana were very similar to those of the terrorists will be seen by the following quotation from his famous book: "It is a question," he writes, in discussing the best means of killing a king, "whether it is more expedient to use poison or the dagger. The use of poison in the food has a great advantage in that it produces its effect without exposing the life of the one who has recourse to this method. But such a death would be a suicide, and one is not permitted to become an accomplice to a suicide. Happily, there is another method available, that of poisoning the clothing, the chairs, the bed. This is the method that it is necessary to put into execution in imitation of the Mauritanian kings, who, under the pretext of honoring their rivals with gifts, sent them clothes that had been sprinkled with an invisible substance, with which contact alone has a fatal effect." [(12)]
It has also been pointed out that, although Catholics have rarely been given to revolutionary political and economic theories, the Mafia and the Camorra in Italy, the Fenians in Ireland, and the Molly Maguires in America were all organizations of Catholics which pursued the same terrorist tactics that we find in the anarchist movement. These are unquestionable facts, yet they explain nothing. Certainly Zenker is justified in saying, "The deeds of people like Jacques Clément, Ravaillac, Corday, Sand, and Caserio, are all of the same kind; hardly anyone will be found to-day to maintain that Sand's action followed from the views of the Burschenschaft, or Clément's from Catholicism, even when we learn that Sand was regarded by his fellows as a saint, as was Charlotte Corday and Clément, or even when learned Jesuits like Sa, Mariana, and others, cum licentia et approbatione superiorum, in connection with Clément's outrage, discussed the question of regicide in a manner not unworthy of Nechayeff or Most." [(13)] It therefore ill becomes the Catholic clergy to attack socialism on the ground of regicide, as not one socialist book or one socialist leader has ever yet been known to advocate even tyrannicide. On the other hand, while terrorism has been extraordinarily prevalent in Catholic countries, such as France, Italy, and Spain, no socialist will seriously seek to lay the blame on the Catholic Church. The truth is that the forces which produce terrorism affect the Catholic mind as they affect the Protestant mind. In every struggle for liberty and justice against religious, political, or industrial oppression, some men are moved to take desperate measures regardless of whether they are Catholics, Protestants, or pagans.
Still other seekers after the causes of terrorism have pointed out that the ethics of our time appear to justify the terrorist and his tactics. History glorifies the deeds of numberless heroes who have destroyed tyrants. The story of William Tell is in every primer, and every schoolboy is thrilled with the tale of the hero who shot from ambush Gessler, the tyrant.[M] From the Old Testament down to even recent history, we find story after story which make immortal patriots of men who have committed assassination in the belief that they were serving their country. And can anyone doubt that Booth when he shot President Lincoln[N] or that Czolgosz when he murdered President McKinley was actuated by any other motive than the belief that he was serving a cause? It was the idea of removing an industrial tyrant that actuated young Alexander Berkman when he shot Henry C. Frick, of the Carnegie Company. These latter acts are not recorded in history as heroic, simply and solely because the popular view was not in sympathy with those acts. Yet had they been committed at another time, under different conditions, the story of these men might have been told for centuries to admiring groups of children.
