s when we came out anent the attempt of the Government to
"get at" us separately in prison, and how we answered the blandishments
of the highly "intelligent and refined" persons set on to pump us. One
laughed; another told extravagant long-bow stories to the envoy; a third
held a sulky silence; a fourth damned the polite spy and bade him hold
his jaw--and that was all they got out of us.'

"So passed the second day of the great strike. It was clear to all
thinking people that the third day would bring on the crisis; for the
present suspense and ill-concealed terror was unendurable. The ruling
classes, and the middle-class non-politicians who had been their real
strength and support, were as sheep lacking a shepherd; they literally
did not know what to do.

"One thing they found they had to do: try to get the 'rebels' to do
something. So the next morning, the morning of the third day of the
strike, when the members of the Committee of Public Safety appeared again
before the magistrate, they found themselves treated with the greatest
possible courtesy--in fact, rather as envoys and ambassadors than
prisoners. In short, the magistrate had received his orders; and with no
more to do than might come of a long stupid speech, which might have been
written by Dickens in mockery, he discharged the prisoners, who went back
to their meeting-place and at once began a due sitting. It was high
time. For this third day the mass was fermenting indeed. There was, of
course, a vast number of working people who were not organised in the
least in the world; men who had been used to act as their masters drove
them, or rather as the system drove, of which their masters were a part.
That system was now falling to pieces, and the old pressure of the master
having been taken off these poor men, it seemed likely that nothing but
the mere animal necessities and passions of men would have any hold on
them, and that mere general overturn would be the result. Doubtless this
would have happened if it had not been that the huge mass had been
leavened by Socialist opinion in the first place, and in the second by
actual contact with declared Socialists, many or indeed most of whom were
members of those bodies of workmen above said.

If anything of this kind had happened some years before, when the masters
of labour were still looked upon as the natural rulers of the people, and
even the poorest and most ignorant man leaned upon them for suppor