courses were for the popular cause. Says one of the prisoners: 'It
was great sport comparing notes 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