this meant, and after an attempt to fight the matter out by divisions
in 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