s it only the charm of nice clothes and personal appearance that
attracted them. Horror added its tremulous delight. There the sentry
stood, ready to kill people at a word. His right knee was slightly bent,
and against his right foot he propped the long wooden instrument that he
killed with. In little pouches round his belt he carried the pointed
bits of metal that the instrument shoots out quicker than arrows. It was
whispered that some of them were placed already inside the gun itself,
and could be fired as fast as a teacher could count, and each would kill
a man. And at the end of the gun gleamed a knife, about as long as a
butcher's carving-knife. It would go through a fattish person's body as
through butter, and the point would stick a little way through the
clothes at his back. Down each side of the knife ran a groove to let the
blood out, so that the man might die quicker. It was a pleasure to look
at such a thing. It was better than watching the sheep and oxen driven
into the Aldgate slaughter-houses. It was almost as good as the glimpse
of the executioner driving up to Pentonville in his dog-cart the evening
before an execution.

Few have given the Home Office credit for the amount of interesting and
cheap amusement it then afforded by parcelling out the country among the
military authorities. In a period of general lassitude and holiday, it
supplied the populace with a spectacle more widely distributed than the
Coronation, and equally encouraging to loyalty. For it is not only
pleasure that the sight of the soldiers in their midst provides: it
gives every man and woman and child an opportunity of realising the
significance of uniforms. Here are soldiers, men sprung from the working
classes, speaking the same language, and having the same thoughts; men
who have been brought up in poor homes, have known hunger, and have
nearly all joined the army because they were out of work. And now that
they are dressed in a particular way, they stand there with guns and
those beautiful gleaming knives, ready, at a word, to kill people--to
kill their own class, their own friends and relations, if it so happens.
The word of command from an officer is alone required, and they would do
it. People talk about the reading of the Riot Act and the sounding of
the bugles in warning before the shooting begins; but no such warning is
necessary. Lord Mansfield laid it down in 1780 that the Riot Act was but
"a step in terrorism and of gent