Meanwhile, below the thin and treacherous surface, the volcanic fires of a socialistic agitation were blazing up with daily increasing fierceness. The failure of work to laboring men; the widespread and intense suffering consequent thereupon; the conviction that this was not due to any lack of zeal or industry on their part, but to the unequal workings of an artificial and false social order; the growing belief that poverty had become a bar to civil rights, even in the courts, and that wealth had become a sufficient protector of injustice and crime,--all these things combined to add an irresistible weight in the minds of thousands of the less discriminating among the laboring class, especially those of foreign birth, to the arguments and appeals of the socialistic leaders in behalf of a complete overturn,--a “revolution.” Some of these socialistic apostles were simply theorists who could not comprehend why their lofty ideals were in any way impracticable. Others were fanatics,--honest, zealous, earnest, and illogical as fanatics have always been. Others were really maniacs, whom a long life spent under the oppression and tyranny of foreign monarchies had driven into a fierce and virulent hatred of all government and all order. Others were men who would have been unwilling to earn their daily bread by honest industry, had the means been placed at their hands, but who foresaw in great popular disturbances possibilities for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. All worked harmoniously, however, in the common direction of social anarchy. They had utterly unlike conceptions of the new order which ought to be established on the ruins of the old, but they were united in the one conviction that the old must be wholly demolished before the task of reconstruction could be properly begun. And so idealists of noble but impracticable aspirations, and brawling fanatics, and beery mountebanks, and maniacs ambitious for unbridled and orderless anarchy, though perhaps not on speaking terms with each other personally, worked together for one common end, and that end revolution and destruction.