see fists go up and come down, with other signs and shows of a heady fight; then the President and the Vice disappeared through the door of entrance, and the victorious Socialists turned and marched back, mounted the tribune, flung the President’s bell and his remaining papers abroad, and then stood there in a compact little crowd, eleven strong, and held the place as if it were a fortress.  Their friends on the floor were in a frenzy of triumph, and manifested it in their deafening way.  The whole House was on its feet, amazed and wondering.

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.

It was a tremendous episode.  The memory of it will outlast all the thrones that exist to-day.  In the whole history of free parliaments the like of it had been seen but three times before.  It takes its imposing place among the world’s unforgettable things.  It think that in my lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I know that I have seen it once.

Some of the results of this wild freak followed instantly.  The Badeni government came down with a crash; there was a popular outbreak or two in Vienna; there were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague, followed by the establishing there of martial law; the Jews and Germans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed; in other Bohemian towns there was rioting—­in some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs—­and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on.  We are well along in December now;[3] the next new Minister-President has not been able to patch up a peace among the warring factions of the parliament, therefore there is no use in calling it together again for the present; public opinion believes that parliamentary government and the Constitution are actually threatened with extinction, and that the permanency of the monarchy itself is a not absolutely certain thing!