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 classes were now raising their voices. "Stop the war! Stop the war!" was the cry heard on every hand. Nearly all the shops containing provisions in Whitechapel Road, Commercial Road East, and Cable Street were, during Monday, ruthlessly broken open and ransacked. The police from Leman Street were utterly incompetent to hold back the rush of the infuriated thousands, who fought desperately with each other for the spoils, starving men, women, and children all joining in the fray.

The East End had indeed become utterly lawless. The big warehouses in the vicinity of the docks were also attacked and most of them emptied of their contents, while two at Wapping, being defended by the police, were deliberately set on fire by the rioters, and quantities of wheat burned.

Fierce men formed themselves into raiding bands and went westward that night, committing all sorts of depredations. The enemy were upon them, and they did not mean to starve, they declared. Southwark and Bermondsey, Walworth and Kennington had remained quiet and watchful all the week, but now, when the report spread of this latest disaster to our troops at Sheffield, and that the Germans were already approaching London, the whole populace arose, and the shopbreaking, once started in the Walworth and Old Kent Roads, spread everywhere throughout the whole of South London.

In vain did the police good-humouredly cry to them to remain patient; in vain did the Lord Mayor address the multitude from the steps of the Royal Exchange; in vain did the newspapers, inspired from headquarters, with one accord urge the public to remain calm, and allow the authorities to direct their whole attention towards repelling the invaders. It was all useless. The public had made up its mind.

At last the bitter truth was being forced home upon the public, and in every quarter of the metropolis those very speakers who, only a couple of years before, were crying down the naval and military critics who had