It was an astonishing situation, and imposingly dramatic. Nobody had
looked for this. The unexpected had happened. What next? But there can
be no next; the play is over; the grand climax is reached; the
possibilities are exhausted; ring down the curtain.
Not yet. That distant door opens again. And now we see what history
will be talking of five centuries hence: a uniformed and helmeted
battalion of bronzed and stalwart men marching in double file down the
floor of the House--a free parliament profaned by an invasion of brute
force!
It was an odious spectacle--odious and awful. For one moment it was an
unbelievable thing--a thing beyond all credibility; it must be a
delusion, a dream, a nightmare. But no, it was real--pitifully real,
shamefully real, hideously real. These sixty policemen had been
soldiers, and they went at their work with the cold unsentimentality of
their trade. They ascended the steps of the tribune, laid their hands
upon the inviolable persons of the representatives of a nation, and
dragged and tugged and hauled them down the steps and out at the door;
then ranged themselves in stately military array in front of the
ministerial estrade, and so stood.
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