n the
House of Commons, they made a protest, left the House, and came in a body
to the Committee of Public Safety: and the civil war began again in good
earnest.

"Yet its first act was not one of mere fighting. The new Tory Government
determined to act, yet durst not re-enact the state of siege, but it sent
a body of soldiers and police to arrest the Committee of Public Safety in
the lump. They made no resistance, though they might have done so, as
they had now a considerable body of men who were quite prepared for
extremities. But they were determined to try first a weapon which they
thought stronger than street fighting.

"The members of the Committee went off quietly to prison; but they had
left their soul and their organisation behind them. For they depended
not on a carefully arranged centre with all kinds of checks and counter-
checks about it, but on a huge mass of people in thorough sympathy with
the movement, bound together by a great number of links of small centres
with very simple instructions. These instructions were now carried out.

"The next morning, when the leaders of the reaction were chuckling at the
effect which the report in the newspapers of their stroke would have upon
the public--no newspapers appeared; and it was only towards noon that a
few straggling sheets, about the size of the gazettes of the seventeenth
century, worked by policemen, soldiers, managers, and press-writers, were
dribbled through the streets. They were greedily seized on and read; but
by this time the serious part of their news was stale, and people did not
need to be told that the GENERAL STRIKE had begun. The railways did not
run, the telegraph-wires were unserved; flesh, fish, and green stuff
brought to market was allowed to lie there still packed and perishing;
the thousands of middle-class families, who were utterly dependant for
the next meal on the workers, made frantic efforts through their more
energetic members to cater for the needs of the day, and amongst those of
them who could throw off the fear of what was to follow, there was, I am
told, a certain enjoyment of this unexpected picnic--a forecast of the
days to come, in which all labour grew pleasant.

"So passed the first day, and towards evening the Government grew quite
distracted. They had but one resource for putting down any popular
movement--to wit, mere brute-force; but there was nothing for them
against which to use their army and police: no