'The insatiable greed of the lower classes must be repressed'-- 'The people must be taught a lesson'-- these were the sacramental phrases current amongst the reactionists, and ominous enough they were." The old man stopped to look keenly at my attentive and wondering face; and then said: "I know, dear guest, that I have been using words and phrases which few people amongst us could understand without long and laborious explanation; and not even then perhaps.

But since you have not yet gone to sleep, and since I am speaking to you as to a being from another planet, I may venture to ask you if you have followed me thus far ?" "O yes," said I, "I quite understand: pray go on; a great deal of what you have been saying was common place with us--when--when--" "Yes," said he gravely, "when you were dwelling in the other planet.
Well, now for the crash aforesaid.
"On some comparatively trifling occasion a great meeting was summoned by the workmen leaders to meet in Trafalgar Square (about the right to meet in which place there had for years and years been bickering).

The civic bourgeois guard (called the police) attacked the said meeting with bludgeons, according to their custom; many people were hurt in the _melee_, of whom five in all died, either trampled to death on the spot, or from the effects of their cudgelling; the meeting was scattered, and some hundred of prisoners cast into gaol.

A similar meeting had been treated in the same way a few days before at a place called Manchester, which has now disappeared.

Thus the 'lesson' began.