A curt and sarcastic reply was despatched from Washington to the English note, and care was taken that it should be published as widely in the United States as that document had been. It was received with a roar of Irish triumph. A few journals criticised it; but they soon found that there was so much resentment at the offensive tone of the British letter even among men who sympathized least with the Irish plot that the Secretary’s snub caused fully as much quiet enjoyment as annoyance. Other correspondence followed between the two foreign offices in constantly angrier spirit, and the spring of 1887 found both nations standing on the very verge of war, waiting only for some overt _casus belli_ to draw the sword against each other. Such was the domestic condition of the country, such the elements of convulsion and upheaval fermenting beneath the thin crust of its social order, such its relations with the greatest naval Power of the world, in the month of April, 1887. From that time the march of events was rapid to the final disaster. V. THE FIRST ERUPTION. The 19th of April was a fateful day in the history of the Republic. On the 19th of April, 1775, was fought the battle of Lexington, from which the nation dated its birth as an independent Power. On the 19th of April, 1861, the Massachusetts Volunteers, hurrying to Washington to protect the national capital from the threatened attacks of Southern rebels, were fired upon in the streets of Baltimore by a mob of rebel sympathizers. On the 19th of April, 1887, began in bloody earnest the revolution which was fated to end in the utter extinction of the Republic and the erasure of its once proud name from the list of nations. The socialist leaders took to heart and profited by the lesson which the Cincinnati riots of 1884 had taught. Those disturbances began in the indignation of an outraged public, angered beyond endurance by the shameful, repeated, and demoralizing defeats to which justice had been subjected in the local courts of law. But they soon took on a different cast. What had at first been the protest of good citizenship was transformed into a saturnalia of crime and ruffianism. Yet the very fact that good citizens had been concerned in the first day’s imprudences made the task of putting down the outlaws and criminals who continued the riots on the second and third days so much the more difficult. The suggestion contained in this was not to lie fallow in the secret councils where anarchy was plotted. Long after the conspirators were ready to strike, they delayed the blow, till an occasion should arise in which they might seem, for a time at least, to be the allies of good and patriotic citizens. Had a leader with a purpose been behind the Cincinnati riots, they saw that the work of suppressing them, after their initial success, would have taxed the resources of the country as well as the State. They waited for an opportunity.