Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/258

 MARK TWAIN

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 pro faned 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 unsentimental! ty of their trade. They ascended the steps of the tribune, laid their hands upon the inviolable persons of the represent atives 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 im posing place among the world s unforgetable things. I 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

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