lice to the pitch of assassination. Dreadful reprisals. Savage
times come again. Blood! Blood! Yaha!" The nearer Babble Machine hooted
stupendously, "Galloop, Galloop," drowned the end of the sentence, and
proceeded in a rather flatter note than before with novel comments on the
horrors of disorder. "Law and order must be maintained," said the nearer
Babble Machine.

"But," began Graham.

"Don't ask questions here," said Asano, "or you will be involved in an
argument."

"Then let us go on," said Graham, "for I want to know more of this."

As he and his companion pushed their way through the excited crowd that
swarmed beneath these voices, towards the exit, Graham conceived more
clearly the proportion and features of this room. Altogether, great and
small, there must have been nearly a thousand of these erections,
piping, hooting, bawling and gabbling in that great space, each with its
crowd of excited listeners, the majority of them men dressed in blue
canvas. There were all sizes of machines, from the little gossiping
mechanisms that chuckled out mechanical sarcasm in odd corners, through
a number of grades to such fifty-foot giants as that which had first
hooted over Graham.

This place was unusually crowded, because of the intense public interest
in the course of affairs in Paris. Evidently the struggle had been much
more savage than Ostrog had represented it. All the mechanisms were
discoursing upon that topic, and the repetition of the people made the
huge hive buzz with such phrases as "Lynched policemen," "Women burnt
alive," "Fuzzy Wuzzy." "But does the Master allow such things?" asked a
man near him. "Is _this_ the beginning of the Master's rule?"

Is _this_ the beginning of the Master's rule? For a long time after he
had left the place, the hooting, whistling and braying of the machines
pursued him; "Galloop, Galloop," "Yahahah, Yaha, Yap! Yaha!" Is _this_
the beginning of the Master's rule?

Directly they were out upon the ways he began to question Asano closely
on the nature of the Parisian struggle. "This disarmament! What was their
trouble? What does it all mean?" Asano seemed chiefly anxious to reassure
him that it was "all right."

"But these outrages!"

"You cannot have an omelette," said Asano, "without breaking eggs. It is
only the rough people. Only in one part of the city. All the rest is all
right. The Parisian labourers are the wildest in the world, except ours."

"What! the Londoners?