By this time England might be said to be under famine. London, in its ice-bound straits, began curiously to assume the appearance of a mediæval city. By night one might meet grotesquely clad bands of revellers returning from some ice carnival (for the Thames had long been frozen from the Tower to Gravesend) by the light of lanterns and torches which they carried. None but those who had nothing to lose ventured out into the streets at night except by companies. Thieves and bludgeoners lurked in every archway, and arrests were seldom made; beggars importuned with every wile and in every tone, and new fantastic creeds and extravagant new parties sent out their perfervid disciples to proclaim Utopias at every corner.
To add to the terror of the night there suddenly sprang into prominence the bands of "Running Madmen" who swept through the streets like fallen leaves in an autumn gale. Barefooted, gaunt, and wildly dressed in rags, they broke upon the astonished wayfarer's sight, and passed out again into the gloom before he could ask himself what strange manner of men they were. Never alone, seldom exceeding a score in any band, they ran keenly as though with some purposeful end in view, for the most part silently, but now and then startling the quiet night with an inarticulate wail or a cry of woe or lamentation, but they turned from street to street in aimless intricacy, and sought no definite goal. They were never seen by day, and whence they came or where they had their homes none could say, but the steady increase in the number of their bands showed that they were undoubtedly the victims of a contagious mania such as those that have appeared in the past from time to time.
Almost as ragged and unkempt was the army that by day marched under the standard of Brother Ambrose towards the sinless New Jerusalem. Reading the abundant signs all round with an inspired and fatalistic eye, Ambrose uncompromisingly announced that all the portents of the Millennium were now fulfilled, and that the reign of temporal power on earth was at an end. Each day his eloquence mounted to a wilder flight, each day he dreamed new dreams and saw fresh visions, and promised to his followers more definitely the spoil of victory, and parcelled out the smiling, fruitful land. Drawn by every human passion, recruits poured into his ranks, and when he marched in tattered state to mark the boundaries of the impending Golden City, the Legions of the Chosen rolled not in their thousands, but in their tens of thousands, singing hymns and interspersing ribaldry.
A very different spectacle was afforded by the bands of the Gilded Youth which by day patrolled the approaches to houses of the better class, wherever smoke had been seen issuing from the chimneys, and by night with equal order and thoroughness turned out the public gas lamps in the streets, until many of the authorities at last gave up the lighting of the lamps as a useless formality.
It was impossible for the occupants of a house that had incurred their enmity to have them removed by force, or to maintain an attitude of unconcern in the face of their demonstration, yet everything they did came under the term of "Peaceful Picketing" within the provisions of the Act, and an attempt to fix responsibility upon the Unity League for the high-handed action of its agents in a few cases where the Gilded Youth had gone beyond their powers, failed ignominiously through the precedent afforded by the final settlement of the celebrated Tawe Valley Case.
In the provinces the rioters were burning coal, burning coal-pits, smashing machinery and destroying property indiscriminately, blind to the fact that some of the immediate effects were falling on their fellow-workmen, and that most of the ultimate effects would fall upon themselves. In London and elsewhere the bands of the Gilded Youth were going quietly and systematically about their daily work, "peacefully" terrorising house-holders into submission, and carefully turning out the public lamps at night as soon as they were lit. To the reflective mind it was rather a dreadful power that the time had called into being: an educated mob that "rioted peacefully" and did nothing at all that was detrimental to its own interest.
Each morning people assured one another that so unparalleled a frost could last no longer, but each night the air seemed to be whetted to a keener edge, and each day there came fresh evidences of its power. Early in January it was computed that all the small birds that had not taken refuge in towns were dead, partly through the cold itself, but equally by starvation, for the ground yielded them nothing, and the trees and shrubs upon which they had been able to rely for food in former winters had long since perished. There were none but insignificant hollies to be seen in English gardens for the next generation, and in exposed situations forest trees and even oaks were split down to the ground.
All this time there was very little destructive rioting going on in London on any organised scale, but every night breadths of wood pavement were torn up by the homeless vagrants, who were now allowed to herd where they could, and great fires set burning at which the police warmed themselves and mingled supinely with the crowd. By day the police went in pairs, by night they patrolled in companies of five. For the emergency of serious rioting the military were always kept in readiness; against the more ordinary depredations on private property the owners were practically left to defend themselves. In those dark weeks watch duty became one of the regular occupations among the staff of every London business, and short shrift was given to intruders. Inquests went like marriages in busy churches at Easter-tide—in batches, and the morning cart that picked up the frozen dead had only one compartment.
The time was past when the effects of the vast disorganisation could be localised. Every trade and profession, every trivial and obscure calling, and every insignificant little offshoot of that great trunk called Commerce was involved in depression; it was not too much to say that every individual in the land was feeling some ill effect. Frantic legislation had begun it ten years before; the coal war had brought it to a climax, and the grip of the long, hard winter had pressed like a hostile hand upon the land.
It had resolved itself into a war of endurance. Coal was no longer the pivot; it was money, immediate money with which to buy bread at the bakers' shops, where they carried on their trade with the shutters up and loaded weapons laid out in the upper rooms.