in Paris!?7°)

(Excerpt)

[London, about 25 January 1885]

…You know what efforts the Russian government has made for years to compel England and France – above all, however, England – to extradite the heroic nihilists. Were these two countries to be won over to such a course, the rest of Europe would have to follow suit. One might then even hope to draw America into this movement.

Now the *Pall Mall Gazette* of 15 January carried an article by a Mrs. Nowikow, a woman devoted body and soul to tsarism, who once again appealed to England to grant asylum no longer to the Hartmanns, Stepniaks, and all those who “organise murder in Russia”. In it, the English are told that they are now exposed to the same dynamite outrages; the refuge they grant to the Russian dynamiters is granted by America to the Irish dynamiters. What England demands of America, it says, is precisely what Russia demands of England.

That is plain enough. But it gets better. On the morning of 24 January all the newspapers published the text of the treaty concluded through diplomatic channels between St Petersburg and Berlin!?] which lays down the extradition of political emigrants and is to be extended to Germany and then to the whole of Europe.

And on that very same 24 January, in the afternoon, London is thrown into terror by a triple explosion, attacks directed against the legislature in the House of Commons, against the judiciary in Westminster Hall, and against the executive in the Tower. This time it is no longer a question of blowing up public conveniences!? or frightening travellers on the underground railway. Here it is a concentrated attack on the three great powers of the state, symbolised by the buildings in which they have their seat.

Is this the act of a few over-excited Fenians? Is it not rather the great blow that tsarism needs to force England to join its anti-revolutionary league? If the dynamite is of Russian origin, handled by Russian agents, could it, I ask, have exploded at a more suitable moment to throw the terrified and repentant John Bull at the feet of Alexander III?…

After: “Le Cri du Peuple”,
of 31 January 1885.