thoughts, like the thoughts of the Turk who followed Anacharsis Clootz in the French Convention, “remain conjectural to this hour.” Upon such material clever men set themselves to work with commendable zeal: knowing that the Crowd may be stampeded by constant repetition of the same thing, by pictorial illustration from which it cannot escape, and by the excitement of the appeal flashed upon it seemingly from a variety of different sources that it should advance along a particular road. So a “Coal Consumers’ Defence League” asserted, with monotonous insistence, that coal would rise in price if the Government candidate were elected; and attained the hypnotic success which always recompenses a monotonous insistence sufficiently prolonged. And the “Brewery Debenture Shareholders’ League” announced the approaching misery of the widow and the orphan. And long lines of street bookmakers, in tall white hats and genial, vacant, or bibulous faces, inquired of the passing mob why they should not be allowed to bet in the streets if they wished. And every public-house became a Tory committee room, with all its windows plastered with Tory bills and cartoons, and the evidence of a brisk trade and many conversions within its walls. Outside the Metropolitan Gasworks at the dinner-hour, and in Peckham High Street after nightfall, a cloud of mingled, confused oratory and invective rose to the unconscious stars; as six or seven meetings, each within easy earshot of each other, shouted in hoarse accents for women’s votes or cheaper food or the rights of the publican. Wagon-loads of pictorial illustration wedged their way through the coagulated masses of South London, now lit with fierce glare of torches, now disguised as an illuminated fire-engine pumping truth upon the Liberal mendacities; now loaded with slum children, looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly happy and healthy, but dolorously labelled “Victims of the Public-house Monopoly.” Hysteria, as in all such deliriums, was never far away; women shrieked aloud at meetings, and had to be removed; madness fell upon a boy of twelve, and he stood on the top of a barrel, talking Tariff Reform. The extraordinary good humour, the extraordinary stupidity, and the extraordinary latent forces, so concealed as to be unknown even to themselves, in these shabby, cheery, inefficient multitudes of bewildered and contented men and women, were the dominant impressions of this gigantic entertainment.