 and went on.
    »That massacre of Trafalgar Square began the civil war, though, like all
such events, it gathered head slowly, and people scarcely knew what a crisis
they were acting in.
    Terrible as the massacre was, and hideous and overpowering as the first
terror had been, when the people had time to think about it, their feeling was
one of anger rather than fear; although the military organisation of the state
of siege was now carried out without shrinking by the clever young general. For
though the ruling-classes when the news spread next morning felt one gasp of
horror and even dread, yet the Government and their immediate backers felt that
now the wine was drawn and must be drunk. However, even the most reactionary of
the capitalist papers, with two exceptions, stunned by the tremendous news,
simply gave an account of what had taken place, without making any comment upon
it. The exceptions were one, a so-called liberal paper (the Government of the
day was of that complexion), which, after a preamble in which it declared its
undeviating sympathy with the cause of labour, proceeded to point out that in
times of revolutionary disturbance it behoved the Government to be just but
firm, and that by far the most merciful way of dealing with the poor madmen who
were attacking the very foundations of society (which had made them mad and
poor) was to shoot them at once, so as to stop others from drifting into a
position in which they would run a chance of being shot. In short, it praised
the determined action of the Government as the acme of human wisdom and mercy,
and exulted in the inauguration of an epoch of reasonable democracy free from
the tyrannical fads of Socialism.
    The other exception was a paper thought to be one of the most violent
opponents of democracy, and so it was; but the editor of it found his manhood,
and spoke for himself and not for his paper. In a few simple, indignant words he
asked people to consider what a society was worth which had to be defended by
the massacre of unarmed citizens, and called on the Government to withdraw their
state of siege and put the general and his officers who fired on the people on
their trial for murder. He went further, and declared that whatever his opinion
might be as to the doctrines of the Socialists, he for one should throw in his
lot with the people, until the Government atoned for their atrocity by showing
that they were prepared to listen to the demands of men who knew what they
wanted, and whom the decrepitude of society forced into
