News From Nowhere, Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance

have followed me thus far?”

“O yes,” said I, “I quite understand: pray go on; a great deal of what you have been saying was common place with us—when—when—”

“Yes,” said he gravely, “when you were dwelling in the other planet.  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 had no drilled and armed body of men to direct, they attempted no aggressive measures, but only placarded the walls with somewhat vague appeals to the workmen not to allow themselves to be trampled upon.  However, they called a meeting in Trafalgar Square for the day fortnight of the last-mentioned skirmish.

“Meantime the town grew no quieter, and business came pretty much to an end.  The newspapers—then, as always hitherto, almost entirely in the hands of the masters—clamoured to the Government for repressive measures; the rich citizens were enrolled as an extra body of police, and armed with bludgeons like them; many of these were strong, well-fed, full-blooded young men, and had plenty of stomach for fighting; but the Government did not dare to use them, and contented itself with getting full powers voted to it by the Parliament for suppressing any revolt, and bringing up more and more soldiers to London.  Thus passed the week after the great meeting; almost as large a one was held on the Sunday, which went off peaceably on the whole, as no opposition to it was offered, and again the people cried ‘victory.’  But on the Monday the people woke up to find that they were hungry.  During the last few days there had been groups of men parading the streets asking (or, if you please, demanding) money to buy food; and what for goodwill, what for fear, the richer people gave them a good deal.  The authorities of the parishes also (I haven’t time to explain that phrase at present) gave willy-nilly what provisions they could to wandering people; and the Government, by means of its feeble national workshops, also fed a good number of half-starved folk.  But in addition to this, several bakers’ shops and other provision stores had been emptied without a great deal of disturbance.  So far, so good.  But on the Monday in question the Committee of Public Safety, on the one hand afraid of general unorganised pillage, and on the other emboldened by the wavering conduct of the authorities, sent a deputation provided with carts and all necessary gear to clear out two or three big provision stores in the centre of the town, leaving papers with the shop managers promising to pay the price of them: and also in the part of the town where they were strongest they took possession of several bakers’ shops and set men at work in them for the benefit of the people;—all of which was done with little or no disturbance, the police assisting in keeping order at the sack of the stores, as they would have done at a big fire.

“But at this last stroke the reactionaries were so alarmed, that they were, determined to force the executive into action.  The newspapers next day all blazed into the fury of frightened people, and threatened the people, the Government, and everybody they could think of, unless ‘order were at once restored.’  A deputation of leading commercial people waited on the Government and told them that if they did not at once arrest the Committee of Public Safety, they themselves would gather a body of men, arm them, and fall on ‘the incendiaries,’ as they called them.

“They, together with a number of the newspaper editors, had a long interview with the heads of the Government and two or three military men, the deftest in their art that the country could furnish.  The deputation came away from that interview, says a contemporary eye-witness, smiling and satisfied, and said no more about raising an anti-popular army, but that afternoon left London with their families for their country seats or elsewhere.