Well, now for the crash aforesaid.

"On some comparatively trifling occasion a great meeting was summoned
by the workmen leaders to meet in Trafalgar Square (about the right
to meet in which place there had for years and years been bickering).
The civic bourgeois guard (called the police) attacked the said
meeting with bludgeons, according to their custom; many people were
hurt in the melee, of whom five in all died, either trampled to death
on the spot, or from the effects of their cudgelling; the meeting was
scattered, and some hundred of prisoners cast into gaol. A similar
meeting had been treated in the same way a few days before at a place
called Manchester, which has now disappeared. Thus the 'lesson'
began. The whole country was thrown into a ferment by this; meetings
were held which attempted some rough organisation for the holding of
another meeting to retort on the authorities. A huge crowd assembled
in Trafalgar Square and the neighbourhood (then a place of crowded
streets), and was too big for the bludgeon-armed police to cope with;
there was a good deal of dry-blow fighting; three or four of the
people were killed, and half a score of policemen were crushed to
death in the throng, and the rest got away as they could. This was a
victory for the people as far as it went. The next day all London
(remember what it was in those days) was in a state of turmoil. Many
of the rich fled into the country; the executive got together
soldiery, but did not dare to use them; and the police could not be
massed in any one place, because riots or threats of riots were
everywhere. But in Manchester, where the people were not so
courageous or not so desperate as in London, several of the popular
leaders were arrested. In London a convention of leaders was got
together from the Federation of Combined Workmen, and sat under the
old revolutionary name of the Committee of Public Safety; but as they