Dynamite in Politics-Historical Assassinations—Infernal Machines in France—The Inventor of Dynamite—M. Nobel and his Ideas—The Nitro-Compounds—How Dynamite is Made—The New French Explosive—“Black Jelly” and the Nihilists—What the Nihilists Believe and What they Want—The Conditions in Russia—The White and the Red Terrors—Vera Sassoulitch—Tourgeneff and the Russian Girl—The Assassination of the Czar—“It is too Soon to Thank God”—The Dying Emperor—Two Bombs Thrown—Running Down The Conspirators—Sophia Perowskaja, the Nihilist Leader—The Handkerchief Signal—The Murder Roll—Tried and Convicted—A Brutal Execution—Five Nihilists Pay the Penalty—Last Words Spoken but Unheard—A Deafening Tattoo—The Book-bomb and the Present Czar—Strychnine-coated Bullets—St. Peter and Paul’s Fortress—Dynamite Outrages in England—The Record of Crime—Twenty-nine Convicts and their Offenses—Ingenious Bomb-making—The Failures of Dynamite. THE attempt to gain political ends by an appeal to infernal machines is not a new one. It is as old as gunpowder—and the evangel of assassination is older still. Murder was the recognized political weapon of the Eastern and Western Empires, and the Chicago Anarchists have proved themselves neither better nor worse than the “old man of the mountain” or the Italian princes of the middle ages. During the reign of Mary Queen of Scots the mysterious explosion occurred in the Kirk of Feld in which Darnley lost his life. Somewhat later was the “gunpowder plot,” in which Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The petard and the hand-grenade were the grandfather and the grandmother of the modern bomb, and murderous invention came to its new phase in the infernal machine which Ceruchi, the Italian sculptor, contrived to kill Napoleon when First Consul—a catastrophe which was avoided by the fact that Napoleon’s coachman was drunk and took the wrong turn in going to the opera-house. France was fertile in this sort of machinery. Some years later Fieschi, Morey and Pepin tried to kill Louis Philippe with a similar apparatus on the Boulevard de Temple. The King escaped, but the brave Marshal Mortier was slain. Orsini and Pieri made a bomb, round and bristling with nippers, each of which was charged with fulminate of mercury, to explode the powder within, meaning to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Eugenie. In the year 1866, according to the most trustworthy authorities, dynamite was first made by Alfred Nobel. In speaking of the invention, Adolf Houssaye, the French litterateur, recently said: