—­Do you think they mean business?

—­I beg your pardon, but it would be of material assistance to me in answering your question if I knew who “they” might happen to be.

—­Why, those chaps that are setting folks on to burn us all up in our beds.  Political firebugs we call ’em up our way.  Want to substitoot the match-box for the ballot-box.  Scare all our old women half to death.

—­Oh—­ah—­yes—­to be sure.  I don’t believe they say what the papers put in their mouths any more than that a friend of mine wrote the letter about Worcester’s and Webster’s Dictionaries, that he had to disown the other day.  These newspaper fellows are half asleep when they make up their reports at two or three o’clock in the morning, and fill out the speeches to suit themselves.  I do remember some things that sounded pretty bad,—­about as bad as nitro-glycerine, for that matter.  But I don’t believe they ever said ’em, when they spoke their pieces, or if they said ’em I know they did n’t mean ’em.  Something like this, wasn’t it?  If the majority didn’t do something the minority wanted ’em to, then the people were to burn up our cities, and knock us down and jump on our stomachs.  That was about the kind of talk, as the papers had it; I don’t wonder it scared the old women.

—­The Member was wide awake by this time.

—­I don’t seem to remember of them partickler phrases, he said.

—­Dear me, no; only levelling everything smack, and trampling us under foot, as the reporters made it out.  That means fire, I take it, and knocking you down and stamping on you, whichever side of your person happens to be uppermost.  Sounded like a threat; meant, of course, for a warning.  But I don’t believe it was in the piece as they spoke it,—­could n’t have been.  Then, again, Paris wasn’t to blame,—­as much as to say—­so the old women thought—­that New York or Boston would n’t be to blame if it did the same thing.  I’ve heard of political gatherings where they barbecued an ox, but I can’t think there ’s a party in this country that wants to barbecue a city.  But it is n’t quite fair to frighten the old women.  I don’t doubt there are a great many people wiser than I am that would n’t be hurt by a hint I am going to give them.  It’s no matter what you say when you talk to yourself, but when you talk to other people, your business is to use words with reference to the way in which those other people are like to understand them.  These pretended inflammatory speeches, so reported as to seem full of combustibles, even if they were as threatening as they have been represented, would do no harm if read or declaimed in a man’s study to his books, or by the sea-shore to the waves.  But they are not so wholesome moral entertainment for the dangerous classes.  Boys must not touch off their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine.  This kind of speech does n’t help on the millennium much.