Benham and White went with the crowd.

At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the scattered drift of people became congested.  Gliding slowly across the mass came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even its glass undamaged, and then another and another.  Strikers, with the happy expression of men who have found something expressive to do, were escorting the trams off the street.  They were being meticulously careful with them.  Never was there less mob violence in a riot.  They walked by the captured cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured by a real lady’s company.  And when White and Benham reached the Power House the marvel grew.  The rioters were already in possession and going freely over the whole place, and they had injured nothing.  They had stopped the engines, but they had not even disabled them.  Here too manifestly a majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.

“But this is the most civilized rioting,” said Benham.  “It isn’t rioting; it’s drifting.  Just as things drifted in Moscow.  Because nobody has the rudder. . . .

“What maddens me,” he said, “is the democracy of the whole thing.  White!  I hate this modern democracy.  Democracy and inequality!  Was there ever an absurder combination?  What is the good of a social order in which the men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the conceit that comes with advantage?  This trouble wants so little, just a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all this squalor and evil temper. . . .  What does all this struggle here amount to?  On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the other; suspicion everywhere. . . .

“And you know, White, at bottom they all want to be decent!

“If only they had light enough in their brains to show them how.  It’s such a plain job they have here too, a new city, the simplest industries, freedom from war, everything to make a good life for men, prosperity, glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air.  And mismanagement, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, stupidity, poison it all.  A squabble about working on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble embittered by this universal shadow of miner’s phthisis that the masters were too incapable and too mean to prevent.

“Oh, God!” cried Benham, “when will men be princes and take hold of life?  When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own? . . .  Look at this place!  Look at this place! . . .  The easy, accessible happiness!  The manifest prosperity.  The newness and the sunshine.  And the silly bitterness, the rage, the mischief and miseries! . . .”

And then:  “It’s not our quarrel. . . .”