The Express. — 1867-12-14 (London, England)

LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14.  Ir is our painful duty to lay before our readers this morning the narrative of an outrage which in the diabolical wickedness of its design and in the murderous consequences attending its execution has scarcely any parallel or precedent. The tale is told elsewhere, but we may repeat its chief incidents here. Yesterday afternoon, at about ten minutes to four o'clock, in the light of day and in the midst of the traffic of the streets, a keg of gunpowder, covered with a tarpaulin, was carried on a truck through Corporation-row, Clerkenwell, and deposited on the pavement against the wall surrounding the exercise yard of the Clerkenwell House of Detention, in which the alleged Fenian " Colonel " Berms is confined. It was conveyed by three men and a woman, who scarcely tried to conceal themselves, trusting no doubt to the suddenness and shock of the explosion to cover their retreat. One of them applied a fusee to the barrel, which, after burning for two or three seconds, fired its contents. The wall of the prison-yard, which is between twenty and thirty feet high, and two feet thick, was lifted up and driven in, brick by brick, for many yards of its length ; and eight houses on the opposite side of the street were shattered, and more or less completely destroyed. The two immediately fronting the part of the wall against which the barrel of gunpowder was placed were entirely demolished, with the exception of the front wall of 'one of them. These buildings, which are lofty and spacious, were sub-let in numerous tenements, and densely crowded. The injury done to life and person is appalling. Three persons, two men and one woman, have been killed, and lie now in the dead.house of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Besides these, a woman and two children are miming, and are believed to be buried in the ruins of one of the houses, though up to a late hour last night the researches of the firemen had failed to recover the bodies. Between forty and fifty persons have been wounded, of whom most have received fearful, and some, it is too likely, deadly injury. They include persons of every age and both sexes—from the old man of nearly ninety years, to babies and young children. Thirty-two of these poor creatures have been received at St. Bartholomew's, six at the Royal Free Hospital in Gray's-inn-lane, and five at the Clerkenwell Workhouse. The House surgeon of St. Bartholomew's declares that during his fifteen years' residence he has never seen wounds so fearful nor so much blood. Happily for the ends of justice, three of the four persons believed to be concerned in this infernal massacre have been arrested. Rumours that an attack of some kind was meditated had reached the authorities, and three policemen in plain clothes patrolled the building. At the sound of the explosion they rushed to the spot whence the noise proceeded, and arrested two of the men and the woman—the last, it is said, an habitual visitor to Braxe—who had conveyed the keg of gunpowder to the place. The man who actually applied the fume escaped, the constable who endeavoured to seize him having been knocked down by the shock, but it is believed that the fellow is known, and that his capture will be speedily effected. The feelings of indignation and horror which this diabolic outrage excites do not need to be heightened, and cannot, indeed, be fittingly and fully expressed in words. Its wickedness is portentous and almost superhuman. The mind shrinks from dwelling on the sights and sounds of distress which the Hospital walls enclose, on the physical tortures of the unhappy victims of the outrage, and on the mental anguish of those who discovered there the friends and relatives they sought for but feared to find. Possibly the perpetrators of the crime did not know the full force of the explosive material they used, nor the strength and resisting power of the wall, and