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 falling to pieces, and the old pressure of the master having been taken off
these poor men, it seemed likely that nothing but the mere animal necessities
and passions of men would have any hold on them, and that mere general overturn
would be the result. Doubtless this would have happened if it had not been that
the huge mass had been leavened by Socialist opinion in the first place, and in
the second place by actual contact with declared Socialists, many or indeed most
of whom were members of those bodies of workmen above said.
    If anything of this kind had happened some years before, when the masters of
labour were still looked upon as the natural rulers of the people, and even the
poorest and most ignorant man leaned upon them for support, while they submitted
to their fleecing, the entire break-up of all society would have followed. But
the long series of years during which the workmen had learned to despise their
rulers, had done away with their dependence upon them, and they were now
beginning to trust (somewhat dangerously, as events proved) in the non-legal
leaders whom events had thrust forward; and though most of these were now become
mere figure-heads, their names and reputations were useful in this crisis as a
stop-gap.
    The effect of the news, therefore, of the release of the Committee gave the
Government some breathing time: for it was received with the greatest joy by the
workers, and even the well-to-do saw in it a respite from the mere destruction
which they had begun to dread, and the fear of which most