those who were in the
councils of the Terrorists. The blow had fallen with such stupefying
suddenness that as far as America was concerned the Revolution was
practically accomplished before any one very well knew what had
happened.

Out of the midst of an apparently peaceful and industrious population
five millions of armed men had sprung in a single night. Factories
and workshops had opened their doors, but none entered them; ships
lay idle by the wharves, offices were deserted, and the great reels
of paper hung motionless beside the paralysed machines which should
have converted them into newspapers.

It was not a strike, for no mere trade organisation could have
accomplished such a miracle. It was the force born of the
accumulation of twenty years of untiring labour striking one mighty
blow which shattered the commercial fabric of a continent in a single
instant. Those who had been clerks or labourers yesterday, patient,
peaceful, and law-abiding, were to-day soldiers, armed and
disciplined, and obeying with automatic regularity the unheard
command of some unknown chief.

This of itself would have been enough to throw the United States into
a panic; but, worse than all, the presence of the air-ships, holding
at their mercy the arsenals and the richest cities in the Eastern
States, proved that tremendous and all as it was, this was only a
phase of some vast and mysterious cataclysm which might as easily
involve the whole civilised world as it could overwhelm the United
States of America.

By noon, almost without striking a blow, every dynamite cruiser and
warship on the eastern coast had been seized and manned by the
Terrorists. To the dismay of the authorities, it was found that more
than half the army and navy, officers and men alike, had obeyed the
mysterious summons that had gone throughout the land the night
before; and matters reached a climax when, as the clocks of
Washington were striking twelve, the President himself was arrested
in the White House.

All the streets of Washington were in the hands of the Terrorists,
and at one o'clock Tremayne, after posting guards at all the
approaches, entered the Senate, and in the name of Natas proclaimed
the Constitution of the United States null and void, and the
Government dissolved.

Then with a copy of the Constitution in his hand he proceeded to the
steps of the Capitol, and, in the presence of a vast throng of the
armed members of the American Section, he