The new Tory Government determined to act, yet durst not re-enact the state of siege, but it sent a body of soldiers and police to arrest the Committee of Public Safety in the lump.

They made no resistance, though they might have done so, as they had now a considerable body of men who were quite prepared for extremities.

But they were determined to try first a weapon which they thought stronger than street fighting.
"The members of the Committee went off quietly to prison; but they had left their soul and their organisation behind them.

For they depended not on a carefully arranged centre with all kinds of checks and counter- checks about it, but on a huge mass of people in thorough sympathy with the movement, bound together by a great number of links of small centres with very simple instructions.

These instructions were now carried out.
"The next morning, when the leaders of the reaction were chuckling at the effect which the report in the newspapers of their stroke would have upon the public--no newspapers appeared; and it was only towards noon that a few straggling sheets, about the size of the gazettes of the seventeenth century, worked by policemen, soldiers, managers, and press-writers, were dribbled through the streets.