DEADLY EXPLOSIVES by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Mar 4, 1889

DEADLY EXPLOSIVES.

By Editor

THE following from the Boston Advertiser, in regard to the manufacture and sale of high explosives, is of interest as showing in an impassioned way the danger which threatens society from dynamite and other powerful explosives in the hands of desperate men. The Advertiser says:—

It is a serious question, demanding prompt attention, whether there ought not to be some legislative measures adopted with a view to checking the indiscriminate manufacture, use, and sale of dynamite and similar deadly explosives. As matters are now, any man can buy for a trifling sum of money materials which he can fabricate into missiles of awful destructiveness, carry on his person secure from observation, and employ with well-nigh irresistible effect against life and property. The art of making bombs is said to constitute a principal topic of instruction in the secret Anarchist schools. Newspapers devoted to the propagation of socialistic revolution have not scrupled to advise their readers to learn this art and teach it to their children, declaring that nothing is easier than to learn to make a dynamite bomb.

No adequate provision is contained in existing statutes for dealing with this menace to public welfare. The science of explosives is of very recent date, so far as its most important developments are concerned. Nearly all our legislation on the subject has reference to gun-powder, or, at most, gun-cotton, and nitro-glycerine. The statutes of Massachusetts are probably a fair sample of what has been thought necessary by law-makers in the direction of guarding against danger from explosives. Not one section or line in any enactment of this commonwealth can be found which recognizes the possibility that a man may carry about with him, secure from the knowledge of anyone but himself, an article no bigger than a good-sized playing marble, but which when thrown into a carriage or railway car, is liable to explode with such force as to tear in pieces everything within a radius of many feet. Yet the bomb with which one of the condemned Anarchists in Chicago took his own life was so small that it was believed to have been concealed in the hair of his head; and the dynamite ball that slew the Emperor of Russia, tearing him limb from limb, was said to have been of the size of a boy's marble.

The principle is fully established that public safety requires a strict regulation of all manufacture, sale, and use of explosive compounds. But hitherto restrictions have been devised mainly for the purpose of preventing accident, not crime. Our Massachusetts statutes do, indeed, provide penalties for destroying or attempting to destroy property by the use of explosives, but with that exception all our statutory provisions leave every Anarchist in the State practically free to follow the teachings of Herr Most and O'Donovan Rossa. Surely such ought not to be the case.