upper classes they seemed ruinously revolutionary, were not thorough
enough to give the people food and a decent life, and they had to be
supplemented by unwritten enactments without legality to back them.
Although the Government and Parliament had the law-courts, the army, and
'society' at their backs, the Committee of Public Safety began to be a
force in the country, and really represented the producing classes. It
began to improve immensely in the days which followed on the acquittal of
its members. Its old members had little administrative capacity, though
with the exception of a few self-seekers and traitors, they were honest,
courageous men, and many of them were endowed with considerable talent of
other kinds. But now that the times called for immediate action, came
forward the men capable of setting it on foot; and a new network of
workmen's associations grew up very speedily, whose avowed single object
was the tiding over of the ship of the community into a simple condition
of Communism; and as they practically undertook also the management of
the ordinary labour-war, they soon became the mouthpiece and intermediary
of the whole of the working classes; and the manufacturing
profit-grinders now found themselves powerless before this combination;
unless _their_ committee, Parliament, plucked up courage to begin the
civil war again, and to shoot right and left, they were bound to yield to
the demands of the men whom they employed, and pay higher and higher
wages for shorter and shorter day's work. Yet one ally they had, and
that was the rapidly approaching breakdown of the whole system founded on
the World-Market and its supply; which now became so clear to all people,
that the middle classes, shocked for the moment into condemnation of the
Government for the great massacre, turned round nearly in a mass, and
called on the Government to look to matters, and put an end to the
tyranny of the Socialist leaders.

"Thus stimulated, the reactionist plot exploded probably before it was
ripe; but this time the people and their leaders were forewarned, and,
before the reactionaries could get under way, had taken the steps they
thought necessary.

"The Liberal Government (clearly by collusion) was beaten by the
Conservatives, though the latter were nominally much in the minority. The
popular representatives in the House understood pretty well what this
meant, and after an attempt to fight the matter out by divisions i