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The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson;Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson
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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.

But seriousness comes most in place when we are to speak of our
defenders. Whoever be in the right in this great and confused war
of politics; whatever elements of greed, whatever traits of the
bully, dishonour both parties in this inhuman contest;--your side,
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