as rapidly as they did in the
seventeenth century. There is the same clash of opinion and violence of
party spirit. All sorts of non-conformities struggle for a hearing. One
is reminded of that most stirring period, which is so delightful to read
about, and which must have been so trying for quiet people to live
through.

A host of earnest and wide-awake persons are engaged in the task of
doing what they are told not to do. Their enthusiasm takes the form of
resistance to some statute made or proposed.

The conscientious women who throw stones through shop windows, and lay
violent hands on cabinet ministers, do so, avowedly, to bring certain
laws into disrepute. They go on hunger-strikes, not in order to be
released from prison, but in order to be treated as political prisoners.
They insist that their methods should be recognized as acts of
legitimate warfare. They may be extreme in their actions, but they are
not alone in their theory.

The Insurance Law, by which all workers whose wages are below a certain
sum are compulsorily insured against sickness and the losses that follow
it, is just going into effect. Its provisions are necessarily
complicated, and its administration must at first be difficult. The
Insurance-Law Resisters are organized to nullify the act. Its enormities
are held up before all eyes, and it is flouted in every possible way.
According to this law, a lady is compelled to pay three-pence a week
toward the insurance fund for each servant in her employ. Will she pay
that three-pence? No! Though twenty acts of Parliament should declare
that it must be done, she will resist. As for keeping accounts, and
putting stamps in a book, she will do nothing of the kind. What is it
about a stamp act that arouses such fierceness of resistance?

High-born ladies declare that they would rather go to jail than obey
such a law. At a meeting at Albert Hall the Resisters were addressed by
a duchess who was "supported by a man-servant." What can a mere Act of
Parliament do when confronted by such a combination as that? Passive
resistance takes on heroic proportions when a duchess and a man-servant
confront the Law with haughty immobility.

In the mean time, Mr. Tom Mann goes to jail, amid the applause of
organized labor, for advising the British soldier not to obey orders
when he is commanded to fire on British working-men.

Mr. Tom Mann is a labor agitator, while Mr. Bonar Law is the leader of
the Conservative pa